Carlos Saura

Carlos Saura Atarés (b. 4 January, 1932) is a Spanish film director, photographer and writer. Along with Luis Buñuel and Pedro Almodóvar, he is considered to be one of Spain’s most renowned filmmakers. With a long and prolific career spanning over half a century, Saura’s films have won many international awards. His films are sophisticated expressions of time and space fusing reality with fantasy, past with present, and memory with hallucination. He began his career in 1955 making documentary shorts and gained international prominence when his first film premiered at Cannes in 1960. Although he started filming as a neorealist, Saura quickly switched to films encoded with metaphors and symbolism in order to get around the Spanish censors. In 1966, his film La Caza won the Silver Bear at Berlinale. He won Special Jury Awards for ‘La Prima Angélica’ (1973) and ‘Cría Cuervos’ (1975) in Cannes. In the 1980s, Saura was in the spotlight for his Flamenco trilogy – ‘Bodas de Sangre’, ‘Carmen’ and ‘El Amor Brujo’. He received two nominations for Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film, for ‘Carmen’ (1983) and ‘Tango’ (1998).