Prominent Refugees - Luis Buñuel Portolés

Monday 17 January 2011

Luis Buñuel Portolés (22 February 1900 – 29 July 1983) was a Spanish filmmaker who also acquired Mexican citizenship and worked in Spain, Mexico, France and the United States. He is considered one of the most influential directors in the history of cinema.

Buñuel was born in Calanda, a small town in the province of Teruel, in Aragón, Spain. In 1917, he went to university in Madrid. While studying at the University of Madrid (current-day Universidad Complutense de Madrid), he became a very close friend of painter Salvador Dalí and poet Federico García Lorca, among other important Spaniard artists. Buñuel first studied agronomy then industrial engineering and finally switched to philosophy.

The advent of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 caused the expatriation of many artists and intellectuals from the fascist dictatorship of Francisco Franco.

In exile after the Spanish Civil War, Buñuel settled in Hollywood to capitalize on the short-lived fad of producing foreign-language versions of American films for sales abroad. After Buñuel arrived in Mexico in 1946 and acquired Mexican citizenship in 1949. He relinquished his Spanish passport as it was not possible to have dual citizenship then.

While in Mexico he collaborated with Oscar Dancigers, whose result was his critically acclaimed Los Olvidados (1950), which was recently considered by UNESCO as part of the world's cultural heritage. This made Buñuel an instant world celebrity and the most important Spanish-speaking film director in the world.

Buñuel remained in Mexico for the rest of his life, although he spent periods of time filming in France and Spain.

In 1977 he retired from film making, and wrote an autobiography published in 1982, which provides an account of Buñuel's life, friends, and family as well as a representation of his eccentric personality. In it, he recounts dreams, encounters with many well known writers, actors, and artists such as Pablo Picasso and Charlie Chaplin.  Buñuel was famous for his atheism and in a 1960 interview with Michele Manceaux in L'Express, Buñuel famously declared: "Thank God I'm an atheist."

Buñuel died in Mexico City in 1983.

Antonio Moreira