30 Facts About Carlos Saura

Carlos Saura Atares was a Spanish film director, photographer and writer.

Carlos Saura had a long and prolific career that spanned over half a century, and his films won many international awards.

Carlos Saura gained international prominence when his first feature-length film premiered at Cannes Film Festival in 1960.

Carlos Saura's films employed complex narrative devices and were frequently controversial.

Carlos Saura won Special Jury Awards for Cousin Angelica and Cria Cuervos in Cannes, and he received an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film nomination in 1979 for Mama Turns 100.

Carlos Saura's work continued to be featured in worldwide competitions and earned numerous awards.

Carlos Saura received two nominations for Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film for Carmen and Tango.

Carlos Saura's films are sophisticated expression of time and space fusing reality with fantasy, past with present, and memory with hallucination.

Carlos Saura was born in Huesca, Aragon on 4 January 1932.

Carlos Saura's father, Antonio Saura Pacheco, who came from Murcia, was an attorney and civil servant.

Carlos Saura's mother, Fermina Atares Torrente, was a concert pianist.

The second of their four children, Carlos had an older brother, Antonio Saura, and two younger sisters, Maria del Pilar and Maria de los Angeles.

Carlos Saura's childhood was marked by the Spanish Civil War, during which the Nationalists fought against the Republicans.

Carlos Saura had vivid recollection of his childhood during the war.

Carlos Saura was taught to read by a priest, a relative whom his parents sheltered from anticlerical extremists.

At the war's end, Carlos Saura was separated from his parents and sent back to Huesca to live with his maternal grandmother and aunts.

Carlos Saura described these relatives as "right wings and very religious" who imposed in the child the very antithesis of the liberal education he had received in the republican zone.

Carlos Saura won the Golden Bear in 1981 at the 31st Berlin International Film Festival for his film Deprisa, Deprisa.

Carlos Saura become known for movies featuring flamenco and other traditional dances.

Carlos Saura later made the movies Flamenco, Tango, and Fados.

Carlos Saura considered his film on surrealist master Luis Bunuel to be his best cinematic work.

Carlos Saura was chosen as director for the official film of the 1992 Olympic Games of Barcelona, Marathon.

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.

Between those two marriages, Carlos Saura had a son Shane with actress Geraldine Chaplin.

Carlos Saura was the father of a daughter named Anna from his third marriage to actress Eulalia Ramon, whom he began a relationship in the wake of the shooting of Outrage.

Carlos Saura was an avid photographer and had a collection of over 600 cameras.

Carlos Saura 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.

Carlos Saura was a close friend of fellow Aragonese filmmaker Luis Bunuel.

Carlos Saura died of respiratory failure in his residence of Collado Mediano on 10 February 2023 at the age of 91.

Carlos Saura was due to receive the life-achievement Goya honorary award the following day during the 37th Goya Awards.