Luis Buñuel single and ingenious work screened at Campo Alegre starting this week

Theatre Campo Alegre features a cinema cycle devoted to the work by Luís Buñuel. Starting on 11 July and running till the end of this month, Medeia Filmes and Leopardo Filmes organised the most relevant recap of the outstanding filmography by the Spanish filmmaker who worked in France, Mexico and Spain.

Buñuel directed 32 films, 25 of which will be screened at Campo Alegre, in Porto till the end of the month.

Audiences will be able to appreciate Buñuel's first film "Un Chien Andalou", which was produced in the silent film era, and considered by critic Roger Ebert "the most famous short film ever made, will be screened in Porto on 11 July till the end of the month at Theatre Campo Alegre.

"His first three films, "Un Chien Andalou ", "Age of Gold" and "Las Hurdes", would be enough to guarantee that Luís Buñuel would win his place in the history of cinema" explained to Jornal de Notícias António Costa, of Medeia Filmes.

"The Mexican period is considered his best time in his career as a filmmaker. However, this period is almost unknown among us, and the majority of its films will only premiere now in Portugal. It has granted him many awards in Cannes. These will be the planned films for the first phase of the cycle, and the second phase includes his most renowned films", António Costa concluded.

In 1917, he attended the University of Madrid, where he developed a very close relationship with painter Salvador Dalí and poet Federico García Lorca. Together they formed the nucleus of the Spanish Surrealist avant-garde Movement.

His Jesuit schooling led him to saying that "I'm an atheist, thank God", and in many of his films he would resort to religious iconography but in a wicked form.
His last film, which he produced 48 years later, "That Obscure Object of Desire", won him Best Director awards from the National Board of Review and the National Society of Film Critics. 

Buñuel filmography was often considered subversive and was often associated with the surrealist movement of the 1920s. His artistic career was extensive, from the 1920s through the 1970s, and spans two continents, three languages, and multiple genres, namely experimental film, documentary, melodrama, satire, musical, erotica, comedy, romance, costume dramas, fantasy, crime film, adventure, and western.

At the time of Buñuel death, aged 83, The New York Times wrote of him: "an iconoclast, moralist, and revolutionary who was a leader of avant-garde surrealism in his youth and a dominant international movie director half a century later".

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