Reality and fantasy, dreams and memories flow freely into one another in the haunting, layered works of iconoclastic auteur Carlos Saura, arguably the most important Spanish filmmaker to emerge between Luis Buñuel and Pedro Almodóvar. Achieving international renown during the repressive years of Francisco Franco’s rule, Saura became a model for how to make dissident political cinema under an authoritarian regime, using potent metaphors and symbolism to dodge censors and examine his nation’s troubled twentieth-century history. In complex and often controversial works like PEPPERMINT FRAPPÉ, COUSIN ANGELICA, and CRÍA CUERVOS . . . —frequently starring his longtime partner Geraldine Chaplin—Saura explored the legacy of fascism and its devastating effects on a generation of Spanish citizens, while in often-overlooked post-Franco films such as DEPRISA, DEPRISA he captured the turbulence of a society experiencing the first shockwaves of liberalization.
Directed by Carlos Saura • 1966 • Spain
Starring Ismael Merlo, Alfredo Mayo, José María Prada
Carlos Saura’s international breakthrough is a tour de force of psychological tension in which three men, all veterans of the Spanish Civil War, reunite in the village of Castille for a day of drinking ...
Directed by Carlos Saura • 1967 • Spain
Starring Geraldine Chaplin, José Luis López Vázquez, Alfredo Mayo
The first of Carlos Saura’s many collaborations with Geraldine Chaplin is a darkly comic psychological thriller that casts the actor in a VERTIGO-esque double role as both the glamorous, una...
Directed by Carlos Saura • 1968 • Spain
Starring Geraldine Chaplin, Juan Luis Galiardo, Fernando Cebrián
A dangerous love triangle comes into focus as, over the course of one fateful day, a possessive industrialist (Fernando Cebrián), his unfaithful wife (Geraldine Chaplin), and his flirtatious ...
Directed by Carlos Saura • 1969 • Spain
Starring Geraldine Chaplin, Per Oscarsson, Emiliano Redondo
Teresa (Geraldine Chaplin) and her husband Pedro (Per Oscarsson) live comfortably in an ultramodern brutalist home that is suddenly upended when she inherits a trove of old furniture from her fami...
Directed by Carlos Saura • 1970 • Spain
Starring José Luis López Vázquez, Luchy Soto, Lina Canalejas
Following a car accident, a megawealthy businessman (José Luis López Vázquez) is left paralyzed and with no memory of who he is or of anything connected to his previous life—including the number ...
Directed by Carlos Saura • 1973 • Spain
Starring Geraldine Chaplin, José María Prada, José Vivó
One of director Carlos Saura’s most potent allegories for the hypocrisy and repression that defined Francoist Spain follows Ana (Geraldine Chaplin), a young English woman who arrives at a remote Spani...
Directed by Carlos Saura • 1974 • Spain
Starring José Luis López Vázquez, Lina Canalejas, Fernando Delgado
Carlos Saura’s most explosively controversial work, COUSIN ANGELICA ignited a violent uproar for its provocative treatment of the Spanish Civil War, with the film’s right-wing detractors go...
Directed by Carlos Saura • 1976 • Spain
Starring Ana Torrent, Geraldine Chaplin, Conchita Pérez
Carlos Saura’s exquisite CRÍA CUERVOS . . . heralded a turning point in Spain: shot while General Franco was on his deathbed, the film melds the personal and the political in a portrait of the legacy ...
Directed by Carlos Saura • 1977 • Spain
Starring Fernando Rey, Geraldine Chaplin, Isabel Mestres
In ELISA, VIDA MÍA (“Elisa, My Dear”), Carlos Saura explores one of his recurring obsessions—interplay between past and present, memory and reality—through a spellbinding portrait of a complex father...
Directed by Carlos Saura • 1978 • Spain
Starring Geraldine Chaplin, José Luis Gómez, Xabier Elorriaga
Carlos Saura returns to the potent themes of trauma and repression that run through nearly all of his 1970s films that deal, in one way or another, with the psychological effects of authoritaria...
Directed by Carlos Saura • 1981 • Spain
Starring Berta Socuéllamos, José Antonio Valdelomar
In making DEPRISA, DEPRISA, director Carlos Saura populated his cast with actual denizens of the Madrid streets to tell the story of youth on the edge of doom. Angela (Berta Socuéllamos) is a young waitre...
Directed by Carlos Saura • 1982 • Spain, France
Starring Assumpta Serna, Iñaki Aierra, Álvaro de Luna
Juan (Iñaki Aierra), a playwright obsessed by his torrid family history, attempts to work through the unresolved issues of his past by staging an autobiographical play entitled “Sweet Hours.” As...
Directed by Carlos Saura • 1993 • Spain
Carlos Saura's film of the Games of the XXV Olympiad Barcelona 1992 brings a visual flair and humanism that paid excellent tribute to the Games and to the Catalan capital. The title event, the men's marathon, was chosen both as symbol and leitmotif, in par...
