Alfredo Castellon

Born in Zaragoza in 1930, he had a happy childhood, broken by the Civil War. At the end of it he practiced athletics, graduated in Law in Santiago de Compostela and traveled through Europe. Immediately he was clear about his vocation. “I became fond of movies because there was a neighbor on my street who collected programs and talked to me about movies, and because my aunt Carmen was a box office saleswoman for the Parra family, and she let me in for free,” he recalled in an interview. During his stay in Rome, where he studied cinema for two years, he became friends with  Michelangelo Antonioni , the actress  Rosanna Podestà, and especially María Zambrano, of whom he considered himself a disciple, and to whom he dedicated two documentaries and some texts. “He always treated me with great affection,” he explained. “She has been one of my biggest influences. It was the relationship of a woman with a young man she likes, and we became very close. He reveals his poetic vein to me and tells me that without culture you can’t make movies or anything. And I start reading and cultivating myself.”

Back in Spain, he enrolled in the Madrid Film School, after which he shot  Un salto de agua , his first short. Next, he had to look for a stable job due to the death of his father, so he became part of the staff of the newly born Radio Televisión Española. For this house, he directed more than 400 installments of  Estudio Uno , the mythical program that dramatized great literary and theatrical classics for the small screen. But he also dealt with other popular spaces such as  Novela, Mirar un cuadro, La casa de los Martínez, Visto Para sentencia, El último café  and  Biografía , where he filmed the life of Ramón y Cajal and Azorín, among many others.

In 1959 he was part of the group of poets who traveled by train to Collioure, to pay tribute to the teacher  Antonio Machado who died there . He appears in a commemorative photo together with Blas de Otero, José Agustín Goytisolo, Jaime Gil de Biedma and José Manuel Caballero Bonald among others.

He debuted on the big screen with an ambitious adaptation of  Platero y yo , perhaps unsuccessful, as it apparently had problems with censorship, but without a doubt quite brave, due to the difficulty of adapting the great peak of  Juan Ramón Jiménez ‘s lyrical prose . With the telefilm  Las gallinas de Cervantes , adaptation of a story by  Ramón J. Sender , he received the Europa Television Award. At the beginning of the 1990s, he wrote the script for  San Manuel Bueno, mártir , which was a version of Unamuno’s novel, with Julio Alejandro de Castro.

It is not known where  Alfredo Castellón  found the time to write theater for children and adults, in addition to all this, since he left works such as “Los asesinos de la felicidad” and “Las conexiones”. He wrote texts on Joaquín Costa and Colón, stories and aphorisms. In one of his writings he recalled his experience of adapting Jiménez, and recounted that a group of friends went to visit the tomb of the maniac poet of correction in Moguer. He forgot a book of the deceased in the mausoleum, and when they went to pick it up they observed a couple of corrected poems. “There was no doubt, that was his handwriting.”