Luis Buñuel

His father was Leonardo Buñuel, also a native of Calanda, who had left home at the age of 14 to start a hardware business in Havana, Cuba, ultimately amassing a fortune and returning home to Calanda at the age of 43, in 1898.

He married the 18-year-old daughter of the only innkeeper in Calanda, María Portolés Cerezuela.

The oldest of seven children, Luis had two brothers, Alfonso and Leonardo, and four sisters: Alicia, Concepción, Margarita and María.

He later described his birthplace by saying that in Calanda, "the Middle Ages lasted until World War I".

When Buñuel was four and a half months old, the family moved to Zaragoza, where they were one of the wealthiest families in town.

In Zaragoza, Buñuel received a strict Jesuit education at the private Colegio del Salvador, starting at the age of seven and continuing for the next seven years.

After being kicked and insulted by the study hall proctor before a final exam, Buñuel refused to return to the school.

He told his mother he had been expelled, which was not true; in fact, he had received the highest marks on his world history exam.

Buñuel finished the last two years of his high school education at the local public school, graduating at the age of 16.

Even as a child, Buñuel was something of a cinematic showman; friends from that period described productions in which Buñuel projected shadows on a screen using a magic lantern and a bedsheet.

He also excelled at boxing and playing the violin.

In his youth, Buñuel was deeply religious, serving at Mass and taking Communion every day, until, at the age of 16, he grew disgusted with what he perceived as the illogicality of the Church, along with its power and wealth.

Luis Buñuel Portolés (22 February 1900 – 29 July 1983) was a Spanish and Mexican filmmaker who worked in France, Mexico, and Spain.

He has been widely considered by many film critics, historians, and directors to be one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers of all time.

Buñuel’s works were known for their avant-garde surrealism which were also infused with political commentary.

Buñuel was born on 22 February 1900 in Calanda, a small town in the Aragon region of Spain.

In 1917, he attended the University of Madrid, first studying agronomy then industrial engineering and finally switching to philosophy.

He developed very close relationships with painter Salvador Dalí and poet Federico García Lorca, among other important Spanish creative artists living in the Residencia de Estudiantes, with the three friends forming the nucleus of the Spanish Surrealist avant-garde, and becoming known as members of "La Generación del 27".

Buñuel was especially taken with García Lorca, later writing in his autobiography: "We liked each other instantly. Although we seemed to have little in common—I was a redneck from Aragon, and he an elegant Andalusian—we spent most of our time together...We used to sit on the grass in the evenings behind the Residencia (at that time, there were vast open spaces reaching to the horizon), and he would read me his poems. He read slowly and beautifully, and through him I began to discover a wholly new world."

Buñuel's relationship with Dalí was somewhat more troubled, being tinged with jealousy over the growing intimacy between Dalí and Lorca and resentment over Dalí's early success as an artist.

Buñuel's interest in films was intensified by a viewing of Fritz Lang's Der müde Tod: "I came out of the Vieux Colombier [theater] completely transformed. Images could and did become for me the true means of expression. I decided to devote myself to the cinema".

At the age of 72, Buñuel had not lost his enthusiasm for this film, asking the octogenarian Lang for his autograph.

Often associated with the surrealist movement of the 1920s, Buñuel made films from the 1920s through the 1970s.

In 1925 Buñuel moved to Paris, where he began work as a secretary in an organization called the International Society of Intellectual Cooperation.

He also became actively involved in cinema and theater, going to the movies as often as three times a day.

Through these interests, he met a number of influential people, including the pianist Ricardo Viñes, who was instrumental in securing Buñuel's selection as artistic director of the Dutch premiere of Manuel de Falla's puppet-opera El retablo de maese Pedro in 1926.

He decided to enter the film industry and enrolled in a private film school run by Jean Epstein and some associates.

He collaborated with prolific surrealist painter Salvador Dali creating the films Un Chien Andalou (1929), which was made in the silent era and L'Age d'Or (1930).

The two films are seen as the birth of Cinematic surrealism.

From 1947 to 1960 he developed his skills as a director filming in Mexico making grounded and human melodramas such as Gran Casino (1947), Los Olvidados (1950), and Él (1953).

Here is where he gained the fundamentals of storytelling.

Buñuel then transitioned into making artful, unconventional, surrealist, and political satirical films.

He earned acclaim with the morally complex arthouse drama film Viridiana (1961) which criticized the Francoist dictatorship.

The film won the Palme d'Or at the 1961 Cannes Film Festival.

He then criticized political and social conditions in The Exterminating Angel (1962), and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) the latter of which won the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film.

He also directed Diary of a Chambermaid (1964), and Belle de Jour (1967), as well as his final film That Obscure Object of Desire (1977) the later of which earned the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Director.

Buñuel earned five Cannes Film Festival prizes, two Berlin International Film Festival prizes, and a BAFTA Award as well as nominations for two Academy Awards.

He was nominated once for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968.

Buñuel received numerous honors including National Prize for Arts and Sciences for Fine Arts in 1977, the Moscow International Film Festival Contribution to Cinema Prize in 1979, and the Career Golden Lion in 1982.

Seven of Buñuel's films are included in Sight & Sound 2012 critics' poll of the top 250 films of all time.