Carlos Saura Atarés (4 January 1932 – 10 February 2023) was a Spanish film director, photographer and writer.

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

[1] In the following years, he forged an international reputation for his cinematic treatment of emotional and spiritual responses to repressive political conditions.

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.

Because his father worked for the Ministry of the Interior, the Saura family moved to Barcelona, Valencia, and, in 1953, to Madrid.

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.

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.

In 1962, his film Los Golfos was recognized for its strong sociological impact in helping Spanish youth by tackling the issue of juvenile delinquency in Madrid's poorest districts.

[7] Saura considered his film on surrealist master Luis Buñuel to be his best cinematic work.

[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.