Bigas Luna

Bigas Luna was a Catalan film director, designer and artist. He was born on March 19, 1946, in Barcelona, Spain. He began his professional career working in interior and industrial design, creating the Estudio Gris with Carlos Riart in 1969. His designs during the 1960s showed a great interest in conceptual art and the emerging visual technologies. He won the Gold Delta Award ADI FAD 1970. He moved into movie making in the 1970s, making low-budget shorts with erotic themes. In 1976 he shot his first feature film, Tattoo, achieving notoriety in 1978 with the sexually explicit Bilbao, which was selected for the Cannes Film Festival. His films are typically characterised by a strong emphasis on the erotic, often related to food, something for which he admitted a strong passion. His work often explores and parodies clichés of Spanish identity, but he had an international career and has made films in Spanish, Catalan, Italian, French and English. In 1986 he retired to Tarragona in order to devote his time to painting, while raising his three daughters. He and his wife Celia ran an organic farm which produced wine, ham and other organic products. Luna enjoyed the life of a bon vivant. In 1990 the producer Andrés Vicente Gómez persuaded him to return to cinema and entrusted to him the direction of Las edades de Lulú (The Ages of Lulu), an erotic drama about a young woman exploring extreme sexual practices. This was a commercial success. Without abandoning his dedication to painting and photography, reflected in numerous exhibitions, he began the well-known Iberian Trilogy with Jamón Jamón (Ham, Ham, 1992), Huevos de Oro (Golden Balls 1993) and La teta y la luna The Tit and the Moon, 1994. These films explored the darkest depths of eroticism and stereotypical Spanish machismo. Jamón Jamón, which launched the careers of both Javier Bardem and the 16-year-old Penélope Cruz was a major international success and won the Silver Lion at Venice in 1992. Cruz returned in Volavérunt (1999), a film about the relationship between Francisco Goya and the Duchess of Alba. Subsequently, with the short film for the internet Collar de Moscas (2001), he revived his interest in avant-garde experimentation and audiovisual formats and at the same time he discovered a vocation for the investigation of digital cinema after the creation of the Taller Bigas Luna project with Catalina Pons in 1999. The experience in the Taller introduced them to the world of new technologies and in 2002 they promoted PLATAFORM BL, dedicated to the creation and promotion of innovative projects and new talents. Bigas Luna's varied career as a filmmaker, painter and designer made him a very singular and interdisciplinary artist. He discovered actors Ariadna Gil, Javier Bardem, Jordi Mollà, Penélope Cruz and Verónica Echegui. He was also known for his use of symbols and metaphors in his films. He died of leukemia on April 6, 2013, while working on the film adaptation of Manuel de Pedrolo's novel Mecanoscrit del segon origen. He is survived by his wife, Celia, and three daughters. His legacy as one of the early masters of cinema, especially in the fields of animation and special effects, has been reevaluated by film historians and enthusiasts. His films influenced the surrealist work of filmmakers Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, making him, in many ways, the father of Spanish cinema.