15 films to love Carlos Saura

In the twilight of Francisco Franco's dictatorship, an 8-year-old orphan and her two sisters find shelter in the house of their stern aunt and try their best to acclimatize to a new reality. Can they summon up the courage to grow up?

Three men go hunting rabbits during a hot day. Heat and talking about events that happened in the past make them angry, until they go totally crazy.

Julian, content, meets friend Pablo's fiancée Elena. Obsessed with free-spirited Elena who rejects him. Pursues meek nurse Ana, tries molding her like Elena.

Ana is alive and married with Antonio; they arrive in the manor in the countryside of Spain where she worked as a nanny many years ago, for the centennial birthday of the matriarch. In their reunion, she finds that Jose died three years ago; Juan left his wife Luchy; Fernando is still living with his mother and unsuccessfully trying to fly a hang glider; and the three little girls are grown-up. Further, she discovers that the dysfunctional family is completely broken, and Luchy in embezzling mother's money. When Juan arrives for the celebration, he plots with Fernando and Luchy to kill the mother to get the inheritance. Meanwhile, Antonio has a brief affair with Natalia.

During the Spanish Civil War, a group of comics lightens the days of the Republican troops. Tired of life in the front lines, they make their way to Valencia, accidentally entering enemy land and falling prisoner.

A British governess comes to an isolated house to take care of the children of a convoluted family.

After being given permission to re-inter his mother's body in their family vault, a middle-aged man who survived the Spanish Civil War as a child returns home and relives old memories.

Francisco Goya (1746-1828), deaf and ill, lives the last years of his life in voluntary exile in Bordeaux, a Liberal protesting the oppressive rule of Ferdinand VII. He's living with his much younger wife Leocadia and their daughter Rosario. He continues to paint at night, and in flashbacks stirred by conversations with his daughter, by awful headaches, and by the befuddlement of age, he relives key times in his life, particularly his relationship with the Duchess of Alba, his discovery of how he wanted to paint (insight provided by Velázquez's work), and his lifelong celebration of the imagination. Throughout, his reveries become tableaux of his paintings.

A group of flamenco dancers are rehearsing a very Spanish version of Bizet's dramatization of Prosper Merimee's novella Carmen. The choreographer Antonio falls in love with Carmen, the main dancer. Their story then turns similar to the play.

Mario Suarez is a forty-something tango artist, whose wife Laura has left him. He leaves his apartment and starts preparing a film about tango.

Angela begins to hang around with Pablo and his gang of young robbers.

Elisa hasn't seen her father Luis in nine years, but she receives a telegram from her sister at a time of crisis in their marriage informing her that her father is sick and decides to travel to Madrid to visit Luis for his birthday.

A young girl, after failing an exam, is forced by her father, a taxi-driver, to learn his profession. Soon she discovers that her father is not only a driver but also a member of a racist group eliminating immigrants, homosexual, transvestite, etc. people. She also falls in love with a boy, also a taxi-driver and a "socio" of the group.

As a hall fills with performers, a narrator says that flamenco came from Andalucia, a mix of Greek psalms, Mozarabic dirges, Castillian ballads, Jewish laments, Gregorian chants, African rhythms, and Iranian and Romany melodies. The film presents thirteen rhythms of flamenco, each with song, guitar, and dance: the up-tempo bularías, a brooding farruca, an anguished martinete, and a satiric fandango de huelva. There are tangos, a taranta, alegrías, siguiriyas, soleás, a guajira of patrician women, a petenera about a sentence to death, villancicos, and a final rumba. Families present numbers, both festive and fierce. The camera and the other performers are the only audience.

A middle age construction tycoon is wheelchair-bound and amnesiac from a car accident in the company of his mistress. He alone had access to all his business's secrets, including the combination to the safe and his Swiss bank account.