Carlos Saura
| Carlos Saura | |
|---|---|
Carlos Saura in Calanda (2008)
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| Born |
Carlos Saura Atarés 4 January 1932 Huesca, Spain |
| Occupation | Film director, screenwriter, photographer |
| Years active | 1955–2016 |
| Notable work | |
| Relatives | Antonio Saura (brother) |
Carlos Saura Atarés (born 4 January 1932) is a Spanish film director, photographer and writer from Aragon. His name, with those of Luis Buñuel and Pedro Almodóvar forms a triad of Spain’s most renowned filmmakers. He has a long and prolific career that expands for over half a century. A great numbers of his films have won many international awards.
Saura began his career in 1955 making documentaries shorts. He quickly gained international prominence when his first feature length film premiered at Cannes in 1960. Although he started filming as a neo-realist, Saura quickly switched to films encoded with metaphors and symbolisms in order to get around the Spanish censors. In 1966, he was thrust into the international spotlight when his film La caza won the Silver Bear at Berlin. In the following years he forged an international reputation for his cinematic treatment of emotional and spiritual responses to repressive political conditions.
By the 1970s, Saura was the best known filmmaker working in Spain. His film employed complex narrative devices and were frequently controversial. He won Special Jury Awards for La prima Angélica (1973) and Cría cuervos (1975) in Cannes; and an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film in 1979 for Mama cumple 100 años. In the 1980s he was in the spotlight for his Flamenco trilogy – Blood wedding, Carmen, and Love Bewitched. He continued to appear in world wide competitions earning numerous awards. He received Oscar nominations for Carmen (1983) and Tango (1993). His films are sophisticated expression of time and space fusing reality with fantasy, past with present and memory with hallucination. In the last two decades, Saura has concentrated in works uniting music, dance and images.
Saura was born in Huesca, Aragón, Spain on 4 January 1932. His father, Antonio Saura Pacheco, who came from Murcia, was an attorney and civil servant. His mother, Fermina Atares Torrente, was a concert pianist. The second of their four children, Carlos had two younger sisters Pilar and Angeles and an older brother Antonio Saura, who became a well known abstract expressionist painter. From their parents, the four siblings received a liberal understanding education. Because his father was working for the ministry of interior, the Saura family moved to Barcelona, Valencia and in 1953 to Madrid. Saura’s childhood was marked by the Spanish Civil War, during which Franco and his allies rebelled against the established republican government. Saura has vivid recollection of his childhood during the war, some of them later evoked in his films – the games he played, and the songs he sang, as well as darker memories of bombing and hunger, blood and death. He was taught to read by a priest – a relative whom his parents sheltered from anticlerical extremist. At the war’s end Saura was separated from his parents and sent back to live with his maternal grandmother and aunts in Huesca. He described these relatives as “right wings and very religious” who imposed in the child the very antithesis of the kind of liberal education he had received in the republican zone.
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Wikipedia