Bigas moon

José Juan Bigas Luna, better known as Bigas Luna, was born in Barcelona on March 19, 1946. Although he began university studies, he did not complete them. This did not prevent him from cultivating his taste for interior design and design, a sensitivity for the plastic arts that would be of great help in the peculiar artistic direction of his films. As was his dedication to photography and painting, and his time in the world of advertising and industrial design. With this background, it is not surprising that he launched into his first cinematographic steps in the mid-70s, first with the shorts With ease and International Cocktail .

His first feature was Tatuaje , shot in 1976 based on a novel by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán , although it did not see the light of day until he did his next work, Bilbao (1978), a sordid story of a prostitute who managed to be selected for the Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes. Her film will always be provocative, marked by the eroticism of artistic pretensions, which bursts forth with force in Las edades de Lulú (1990), an adaptation of the novel by Almudena Grandes.

Jamón, jamón (1992), Huevos de oro (1993) and La teta y la luna (1994) make up his famous Iberian trilogy, once again with a strong sexual content, but with a decidedly Mediterranean, oily and shocking touch, which manages to draw the attention, with prizes from the director in Venice for Jamón , from the jury in San Sebastián for Huevos and from the script in Venice for La teta . They are also films that allow the acting launch of, among others, the now very international husband and wife Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz . bambola(1996) seems to confirm that this aggressive erotic line is exhausted, and perhaps for this reason in 1997 he tries something more ambitious, La camarera del Titanic (1997), a colorful and evocative romantic title starring Aitana Sánchez Gijón, which was filmed curiously the same year as James Cameron made history with his own Titanic .

But then Bigas returns to where he used to, that is, the eroticism of playful perversions, either in Volavérunt (1999), which has little of historical cinema although it tells us the supposed story of how Goya paints the painting “La maja desnuda”. ”. Aitana Sánchez-Gijón would be awarded as best actress in San Sebastián. Son de mar (2001) would exploit the most sensual side of Leonor Watling , accompanied by a recurring actor in Luna’s filmography, Jordi Mollà .

With Yo soy la Juani (2004) she not only discovers Verónica Echegui , but also connects with the public by painting the vicissitudes of a neighborhood girl trying to get ahead in life, with fairly recognizable problems and challenges. However, he crashed with DiDi Hollywood (2010), the film that closes his filmography, where the budget shortage is noticeable, and which describes without much credibility the vertigo of fame and success in Hollywood of an actress, whom he gives life to. Elsa Pataki. He leaves the project she was working on unfilmed, Mecanoscrit del segon origen , an adaptation of a novel by Manuel de Pedrolo .

In his later years, after Álex de la Iglesia resigned from his position as president of the Spanish Film Academy , he ran for the position, but was defeated by producer, distributor and exhibitor Enrique González Macho. The filmmaker was closely linked to the city of Zaragoza. Married to Celia Orós from Zaragoza, with whom he had three daughters, he not only contributed to the reinvention of “El Plata” coffee. In 1998 he proposed a change in the way in which the traditional offering of flowers to the Virgen del Pilar was carried out on October 12, devising a beautiful and practical structure that allowed the assembly of a huge floral mantle.