Aranda made his directorial debut with the low-budget Brillante Porvenir (1964) (Promising Future), co-directing with screenwriter Román Gubern to avoid problems with the directors guild of Spain.

[6] Loosely inspired by the American novel, The Great Gatsby, the film used the aesthetic of the neorealism in a story of a young man from the provinces who tries to make it into the Catalan middle class.

[8] Since his first features were not widely seen, Aranda produced a commercially oriented film with fantastic and erotic overtones: Las Crueles (1969) (The Exquisite Cadaver).

This filmed was plagued with a series of problems: it was long in the making; Aranda suffered an accident during the shooting, which forced him to work from a stretcher, and finally he had a legal battle with the producers.

Under the new permissiveness, Aranda shot more daring films such as Cambio de Sexo (1976) (Sex Change), skillfully tackling the subject of transsexuality, and using it as an embodiment of the contemporary political transition.

Cambio de Sexo dramatizes the development of the destape – the period in the late 1970s and early 1980s Spain characterized by a much more open portrayal of sex in the press, literature and film.

Cambio de Sexo recounts the story of a young effeminate boy, played by Victoria Abril, who lives in the outskirts of Barcelona and escapes to the city to explore his desire to become a woman.

His choices usually were guided by the centrality of an erotically defined female character, and a contemporary story emphasizing the force of the milieu on the shaping of actions.

I don't think I am more of an author if I write a screenplay of something I've read on the newspapers or seen on the street that if I take a novel and make a movie based on its contents".

La Pasionaria (the legendary Spanish Communist leader who lived in exile in the Soviet Union during much of the dictatorship) is portrayed as a senile old dear who sits next to the victim but does not realize he is dead.

[16] Made in 16 mm and with a very low budget,[16] the one-hour film tells a story in which incest, jealousy and death mix in Spain at the beginning of the 20th century.

The title character is a military officer, who supports his poor family and pays his gambling debts by plotting an elaborate trap to swindle money from those who fall for the charms of his pretty eldest daughter.

Aranda's career began to soar when he made Tiempo de Silencio (1986) (Time of Silence), an adaptation of the famed Luis Martín Santos novel of the same name.

Aranda's hybrid combination of period drama, thriller and social realism reveals how the criminal career and media profile of this petty thief were manipulated and exploited by the authorities as a diversionary tactic at a time of political unrest.

Compared to Aranda's strongly realistic and political tone in the first installment, in El Lute II, mañana seré libre, he took a more fictionalized, folkloric approach, adopting a more pronounced thriller style.

[18] Featuring violence and eroticism, the film delivered a resounding critique of the Franco regime and its brutal treatment of the Spanish merchero and gitano populations.

[18] Aranda made his most sexually explicit film with Si te dicen que caí (1989) (If They Tell You I Fell), adapted from the novel of the same name by Juan Marsé.

[19] With a labyrinthine structure in which imaginary facts and real events are blended in a crosswords style, the main part of the story is set in the old quarter of 1940s Barcelona during the early years of Francoist repression.

[20] At the request of Pilar Miró, then director of TVE, Aranda took on Los Jinetes del Alba (1990) (Riders of the Dawn) an adaptation of the novel by Jesús Fernández Santos about the Spanish Civil War and the anarchist movement.

[21] Made as a five-part TV miniseries, it features a young woman ambitious to own the resort where she works in a small town in Asturias.

Aranda's favorite topics: cruelty, violence and sex pervade this story framed by the tumultuous life of Spain in the 1930s, the uprising in Asturias in 1934, and the Spanish Civil War.

[25] Still exploring the passion of love, Aranda directed El Amante Bilingüe (1993) (The Bilingual Lover), an adaptation of a story by Juan Marsé.

Some of Vicente Aranda films present real events, things that happen on the street but that have had the appearance of the exceptional occurrences, where passion, toughness, and violence manage to acquire a tone of unreality that is almost literary.

[31] Aranda returned to familiar territory with Celos (1999) (Jealousy), his third work in a trilogy exploring the love triangle, together with his earlier Amantes and Intruso.

[citation needed] In the early 21st century, Aranda started to explore period pieces, initiating a trilogy of historic costume dramas with Juana La Loca (2001) (Mad Love), a reinterpretation of the tragic fate of the 15th-century Spanish queen, Joanna of Castile.

Desire and betrayal, themes that have been recurrent in Aranda's career,[30] are central to the plot of Carmen (2003), a film based on Prosper Mérimée's 1845 novella about jealousy and passion.

[32] Aranda completed his costume drama trilogy with Tirant lo Blanc (2006) (The Maidens' Conspiracy), an adaptation of a seminal Catalan chivalry novel, written in the 15th century by Joanot Martorell.

The plot follows the adventures of Tirante, a knight from humble origins in the Byzantine Empire, who gains the favor of the ailing Emperor by his triumphs in fighting the incursion into Constantinople by the Turks.

Canciones de amor en Lolita's Club (2007) is an erotic thriller, in which sex and brutality are mixed in a story of very different twin brothers.

[34] Aranda's last film, Luna Caliente (2009) (Hot Moon), tells the story of a poet who briefly returns to his home town, gets entangled in a web of sex and violence.