Madrid, Feb 13 (EFE).- The president of the Film Academy, Fernando Méndez-Leite, highlighted this Monday at Carlos Saura’s wake that he has been a filmmaker who “has put his head and his extraordinary intelligence and sensitivity” until “literally the forces have failed him.”
Méndez-Leite has underlined the dedication of Saura, who at 91 still had projects underway and has been his “friend and teacher” for him.
He has recognized that his death last Friday, on the eve of his family collecting the Goya de Honor on his behalf for his state of health, led to “the tribute he deserved, extensive, emotional and at the same time joyful, because it is celebrating the career of a great man who has worked until he was 91 years old, until his strength literally failed him».
“Until the last moment he has put his head and his extraordinary intelligence and sensitivity” to his profession, he said about Saura, “one of the best directors and writers in the history of Spanish cinema who represented us at the Berlin festivals in the seventies or Cannes and always returned with prizes thanks to his masterpieces ».
He has also praised his foray into musicals like “El amor brujo” and in big productions like “El dorado”, about the conquest of America, “a feat of production.”
“He was my friend and my teacher”, he stated, to insist that Carlos Saura remained active until the end -with the documentary “Las paredes hablanda” or the theatrical show “Lorca por Saura”- an accumulation of productions that make him in “an incomparable personality in the Spanish culture of the 20th and 21st centuries”.
The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez; the Minister of Culture and Sports, Miquel Iceta, and personalities from the cultural field such as Pedro Almodóvar, Imanol Arias, Manolo Zarzo, Roberto Álvarez and Mariano Barroso.
