Bigas Luna
| Bigas Luna | |
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Bigas Luna in 2005
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| Born |
Josep Joan Bigas i Luna 19 March 1946 Barcelona |
| Died | 6 April 2013 (aged 67) La Riera de Gaià |
| Other names | Juan José Bigas Luna |
| Occupation | film director |
Josep Joan Bigas i Luna (19 March 1946 – 6 April 2013), known artistically as Bigas Luna, was a Spanish film director, designer and artist. His films are typically characterised by a strong emphasis on the erotic, often related to food, something for which he admitted a strong passion. His work often explores and parodies clichés of Spanish identity, but he had an international career and has made films in the Spanish, Catalan, Italian, French and English languages.
He began his professional career working in interior and industrial design, creating the Estudio Gris with Carlos Riart in 1969. His designs during the 1960s showed a great interest in conceptual art and the emerging visual technologies. He won the Gold Delta Award ADI/FAD 1970.
He moved into movie making in the 1970s, making low-budget shorts with erotic themes. In 1976 he shot his first feature film, Tattoo, achieving notoriety in 1978 with the sexually explicit Bilbao, which was selected for the Cannes Film Festival.
In 1986 he retired to Tarragona in order to devote his time to painting, while raising his three daughters. He and his wife Celia ran an organic farm which produced wine, ham and other organic products. Luna enjoyed the life of a bon vivant.
In 1990 the producer Andrés Vicente Gómez persuaded him to return to cinema and entrusted to him the direction of Las edades de Lulú (The Ages of Lulu), an erotic drama about a young woman exploring extreme sexual practices. This was a commercial success. Without abandoning his dedication to painting and photography, reflected in numerous exhibitions, he began the well-known "Iberian Trilogy" with Jamón Jamón ("Ham, Ham", 1992), Huevos de Oro ("Golden Balls", 1993) and La teta y la luna ("The Tit and the Moon", 1994). These films "explored the darkest depths of eroticism and stereotypical Spanish machismo."Jamón Jamón, which launched the careers of both Javier Bardem and the 16-year-old Penélope Cruz was a major international success and won the Silver Lion at Venice in 1992. Cruz returned in Volavérunt (1999), a film about the relationship between Francisco Goya and the Duchess of Alba.
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