Agustí Villaronga
| Agustí Villaronga | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born |
4 March 1953 Majorca, Spain |
| Occupation | Film director, screenwriter, actor |
| Years active | 1976–present |
Agustí Villaronga Riutort (Catalan pronunciation: [əɣusˈti viʎəˈɾoŋɡə]; born 4 March 1953) is a Balearic Spanish film director, screenwriter and actor. He has directed seven feature films, a documentary, three projects for television and three shorts. His film El niño de la luna was entered into the 1989 Cannes Film Festival.
In 2011 he won the Goya Award for Best Director for Pa negre (Black Bread). The film was selected as the Spanish entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 84th Academy Awards, but it did not make the final shortlist.
Agustí Villaronga was born on 4 March 1953 in Palma de Mallorca, his grandparents had been itinerant puppeteers and his father was a child of the Spanish civil war, a fact that would resurface repeatedly in the director's filmography. Since childhood, his father encouraged his love for films and from early in his life he wanted to become a film director. He worked as an actor and made some shorts.
Villaronga made his directorial debut in 1986 with the film Tras el cristal, which was selected by the Berlin film festival receiving critical praise and many awards. The plot follows a former Nazi doctor, now paralyzed and depending on an iron lung to live, who begins to be taken care of by a young man, who was one of the children he abused during the war. Tras el cristal already shows some of the key elements in Villaronga's filmography: a disturbed childhood marked by violence an early discovery of sexuality.
His second film, El niño de la Luna (1989), is about a child who goes to Africa to join a tribe awaiting the arrival of white child God. In 1992 he made a documentary, Al Andaluz, produced by Segetel and the MoMa of New York city. For some years Villaronga tried unsuccessfully to find financing to adapt a novel by Mercè Rodoreda, Muerte en Primavera. Instead he had to take some commission works. One of these was El pasajero clandestino, a made for television project that lacked the personal characteristics of his filmography.
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