The filmmaker of passionate flamenco choreography dramas led the awakening of Spain's art cinema after the fascist dictatorship under Francisco Franco.
, the films make up Saura’s Flamenco Trilogy, shot as stage productions, or even rehearsals, with minimal set design.Cria Cuervos in 1977, a symbolic treatment of death and Spanish society seen through the eyes of a young girl and starring his muse and common-law wife Geraldine Chaplin as her mother.
Admired by American filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, Saura traced his criticism of bourgeois culture and use of fantasy and flashbacks to surrealist Luis Bunuel, a fellow native of the Aragon region and a close personal friend. “For me the cinema is a type of drug, an obsession,” Saura once said. “What I like is that it is a solitary pleasure.”