Carlos Saura Atarés (4 January 1932 – 10 February 2023) was a Spanish film director, photographer and writer. With Luis Buñuel and Pedro Almodóvar, he is considered to be among Spain's great filmmakers. He had a long and prolific career that spanned over half a century, and his films won many international awards.
Saura began his career in 1955 making documentary shorts. He gained international prominence when his first feature-length film premiered at Cannes Film Festival in 1960. Although he started filming as a neorealist, Saura switched to films encoded with metaphors and symbolism in order to get around the Spanish censors. In 1966, he was thrust into the international spotlight when his film The Hunt won the Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival.[1] In the following years, he forged an international reputation for his cinematic treatment of emotional and spiritual responses to repressive political conditions.
In the 1980s, Saura was in the spotlight for his Flamenco trilogy – Blood Wedding, Carmen and El amor brujo, in which he combined dramatic content and flamenco dance forms. His work continued to be featured in worldwide competitions and earned numerous awards. He received two nominations for Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film for Carmen (1983) and Tango (1998). 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 of the 20th century, Saura concentrated on works uniting music, dance and images.
Saura was born in Huesca, Aragon on 4 January 1932. His father, Antonio Saura Pacheco, who came from Murcia, was an attorney and civil servant. His mother, Fermina Atarés Torrente, was a concert pianist. The second of their four children, Carlos had an older brother, Antonio Saura, and two younger sisters, María del Pilar and María de los Ángeles. Antonio became a well-known abstract expressionist painter. From their parents, the four siblings received a liberal understanding education. Because his father worked for the Ministry of the 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 the Nationalists fought against the Republicans.
Saura had vivid recollection of his childhood during the war. He later evoked some of them in his films – the games he played, and the songs he sang, as well as darker memories of bombings and hunger, blood and death. He was taught to read by a priest, a relative whom his parents sheltered from anticlerical extremists. At the war's end, Saura was separated from his parents and sent back to Huesca to live with his maternal grandmother and aunts. He described these relatives as "right wings and very religious"[citation needed] who imposed in the child the very antithesis of the liberal education he had received in the republican zone. After having studied civil engineering he began a career in the film industry on the advice of his brother Antonio Saura.[1]
Saura become known for movies featuring flamenco and other traditional dances. His Flamenco Trilogy of the 1980s includes Bodas de Sangre (Blood Wedding), Carmen, and El amor brujo featuring the work of Spanish flamenco dancer Cristina Hoyos. He later made the movies Flamenco (1995),[6]Tango (1998), and Fados (2007).
Saura considered his film on surrealist master Luis Buñuel to be his best cinematic work. In an interview with an online film magazine,[8] he said about Buñuel y la mesa del rey Salomón (Buñuel and the table of King Solomon – 2001): "That's the greatest film I’ve ever made. I like the film but nobody else seems to like it. I’m sure Buñuel would have loved this film. But perhaps only he would have loved it. Everything you see in the film is actually based on conversations I had with him."
In 2008, Carlos Saura was honoured with a Global Life Time Achievement Award at the 10th Mumbai International Film Festival, organized by the Mumbai Academy of the Moving Image.[9]
Carlos Saura was married three times. He first married Adela Medrano.[11] They had two sons, Carlos and Antonio.[11] In 1982, he married Mercedes Pérez, with whom he had three sons, Manuel, Adrián, and Diego.[11] Between those two marriages, Saura had a son Shane with actress Geraldine Chaplin.[12] He was the father of a daughter named Anna from his third marriage to actress Eulàlia Ramon [ca; es],[11][13] whom he began a relationship in the wake of the shooting of Outrage.[14] They married in 2006.[14] His daughter Anna was his agent (as well as right hand and producer of his films) in his late years.[15][16]
He was an avid photographer and had a collection of over 600 cameras.[1] His photographs were exhibited several times.[1] He began to take photographs having reached the age of eight years, and later built his own camera by himself and became the photographer of the Granada Film Festival.[17]
1983 – Won: Most Popular Film of the Festival – Carmen
1986 – Won: Prix Special du Festival for his trilogy (Bodas de sangre, Carmen, El amor brujo), on the occasion of the presentation of El amor brujo
1995 – Won: Grand Prix Special des Amériques ("On the occasion of the centennial of cinema, for his exceptional contribution to the cinematographic art")
1997 – Won: Best Director – Pajarico
1997 – Nominated: Grand Prix des Amériques – Pajarico
1999 – Won: Prize of the Ecumenical Jury – Goya en Burdeos
1999 – Won: Best Artistic Contribution – Goya en Burdeos
1999 – Nominated: Grand Prix des Amériques – Goya en Burdeos
2002 – Won: Best Artistic Contribution – Salomé
2002 – Nominated: Grand Prix des Amériques – Salomé
2004 – Won: Best Director – El 7º día
2004 – Nominated: Grand Prix des Amériques – El 7º día
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