He married the 18-year-old daughter of the only innkeeper in Calanda, María Portolés Cerezuela. : pp.16–17 His father was Leonardo Buñuel, also a native of Calanda, who had left home at the age of 14 to start a hardware business in Havana, Cuba, ultimately amassing a fortune and returning home to Calanda at the age of 43, in 1898. David Thomson names him as one of the greatest directors, adding 'He is as intent on comedy as Kafka was, as little intent on showing off style, and as much a victim as the joke he tells.' Early years īuñuel was born on 22 February 1900 in Calanda, a small town in the Aragon region of Spain. Fifteen of his films are included in the They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? list of the 1,000 greatest films of all time, second only to Jean-Luc Godard, with sixteen, and he ranks number 13 on their list of the top 250 directors. Seven of Buñuel's films are included in Sight & Sound's 2012 critics' poll of the top 250 films of all time.

Despite this variety, filmmaker John Huston believed that, regardless of genre, a Buñuel film is so distinctive as to be instantly recognizable, or, as Ingmar Bergman put it, 'Buñuel nearly always made Buñuel films'. Having worked in Europe and North America, and in French and Spanish, Buñuel also directed films spanning various genres. Often associated with the surrealist movement of the 1920s, Buñuel created films from the 1920s through the 1970s. Writer Octavio Paz called Buñuel's work 'the marriage of the film image to the poetic image, creating a new reality.scandalous and subversive'.

His first picture, Un Chien Andalou-made in the silent era-is still viewed regularly throughout the world and retains its power to shock the viewer, and his last film, That Obscure Object of Desire-made 48 years later-won him Best Director awards from the National Board of Review and the National Society of Film Critics. When Buñuel died at the age of 83, his obituary in The New York Times called 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'. He has been widely considered by many film critics, historians, and directors to be one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers of all time.

Luis Buñuel Portolés ( Spanish: 22 February 1900 – 29 July 1983) was a Spanish-mexican filmmaker who worked in France, Mexico, and Spain.

Ashes of Liberty by L.A. Golding