Vicente Aranda

Director

November 9, 1926 (88 years)

† May 26, 2015

Barcelona, Spain

Biography

Vicente Aranda was a Spanish film director, screenwriter and producer. Due to his refined and personal style, he was one of the most renowned Spanish filmmakers. He started as a founded member of the Barcelona School of Film and became known for bringing contemporary Spanish novels to life on the big screen. Aranda was famous for exploring difficult social issues and variations on the theme of desire by employing the codes of melodrama. Love as uncontrollable passion, eroticism and cruelty are c…

Filmography

4.1

The Maidens' Conspiracy

Constantinople, 1401. The emperor of Byzantium asks the famous knight Tirant lo Blanc to free the city from the siege of the Turks. After his victory, Tirant will have to face a more difficult task: to overcome the natural opposition of Carmesina, heiress to the Ottoman Empire, to surrender her most precious treasure.

6.0

La Huella del Crimen

No description available

6.1

Mad Love

The tragic fate of Juana I of Castille, Queen of Spain, madly in love to an unfaithful husband, Felipe el Hermoso, Archduke of Austria.

5.5

Turkish Passion

A young woman’s passion forms the basis of this erotic Spanish drama adapted from a popular novel by Antonio Gala. The night before Desideria’s marriage, her girl friends give her some valuable advice on sex. The marriage takes place, and while it is generally happy, her husband Ramiro suffers from sexual dysfunction and Desideria is frustrated. The two end up on holiday in Istanbul with two friends. Desideria falls madly in love with the sensual ambiance of the ancient, teeming city. She begins a passionate affair with a handsome Turkish guide, Yaman. Upon her return home, she learns that she is pregnant. Ramiro agrees to support the child, but unfortunately it dies in infancy and the grieving Desideria flees for Istanbul to find her lover. She finds him and they renew their torrid affair. Later she learns some distressing things about Yaman, but this does not stop her from becoming his sexual slave and a call girl for wealthy carpet sellers.

4.7

If They Tell You I Fell

In the post Spanish civil war years, Catalan kids would sit in circles among the ruins and tell stories, known as "aventis" (the film's original title in Catalan, its original language). These tales mix war stories, local gossip, comic book characters, fantasy and real events. The "aventis" told in this film are told in flashback. In the mid 80s, 45 or so years after the age of the "aventis," a doctor and a nurse-nun (who grew up together, and now are co-workers in a hospital) identify the corpse of one of the main characters of the "aventis" of their childhood and adolescence. Besides the interesting flashbacks - a chronical of the Civil War in a "typical" Barcelona microcosm itself, the discovery of this body (belonging to someone long presumed dead) leads to other surprises and unresolved doubts, several decades later

4.0

The Bilingual Lover

Joan Mares obsession for the lovely and luscious Norma Valenti takes epic proportions because he cannot let go of her. After he is injured by some skin heads, he uses his scars to pursue his life as a street musician. He devices a plan to get to Norma and she never catches on to his deceit, except she realizes that as Juan Faneca his performance in bed is exactly what she had experienced with Joan Mares because she concludes they were taught sex by the same prostitute.

5.3

Carmen

A French writer documents the seductive power of the beautiful Carmen, who has enchanted José, a young soldier, awakening his most fervent passions leading to tragedy. A path chained to obsession, jealousy, betrayal, and blood.

6.3

Lumière & Company

40 international directors were asked to make a short film using the original Cinematographe invented by the Lumière Brothers, working under conditions similar to those of 1895. There were three rules: (1) The film could be no longer than 52 seconds, (2) no synchronized sound was permitted, and (3) no more than three takes.

6.5

Lovers: A True Story

A torrid affair between a recently discharged serviceman and an attractive widow leads to murder.

4.9

Los jinetes del alba

The inhabitants of Las Caldas, a village in Asturias, in northern Spain, whose life revolves around a sumptuous spa, trace complicated personal relationships while the whole country is inexorably heading towards revolution and civil war.

N/A

El Lute: The Series

Eleuterio Sánchez, alias "El Lute", a merchandise trader by birth and a chicken thief at the beginning of his career, is the reason for his first arrest.

4.9

The Naked Eye

Begoña is a thirty something consultant who has rebelled against her upper middle class background and has overdone it with sex ever since her youth. On recommendation of her psychoanalyst she keeps a video diary of her encounters using a palm-sized video gadget called "The Owl". On Christmas Eve, reluctantly, Begoña goes to have dinner with her dysfunctional family: her stern mother, her married brother and her younger sister. Soon, Begoña, the family’s black sheep, clash with her relatives. She leaves abruptly in disharmony, only her sister seems sympathetic towards her. The same night in a bar, Begoña is befriended by Daniel a solitary handsome man in his late teens. The attractive and self assure Begoña draws his attention, but when her on and off ex boyfriend Elio, and adventurous biker, shows up at the bar, an argument ensures between Elio and Daniel.

5.3

Lolita's Club

The divergent lives of twin brothers, Raúl, a violent policeman, and Valentín, a mentally handicapped man, cross paths again when the former decides to visit his family.

4.5

With Good Reason

A multi-part feature on the governing body of Spain, the Popular Party under Jose María Aznar. Themes include the bombing of Iraq, immigration, U.S. fire in Baghdad, and the manipulation of the media.

4.6

Girl with the Golden Panties

Luys Forest is a writer with a Falangist political past. He lives isolated in a coastal town, writing his memoirs (actually rewriting and adapting his autobiography with the times), and brooding over his failed marriage. His sister is worried about him and decides to send her daughter Mariana to stay with him. Mariana and a seemingly mute and artistic lesbian companion come to town to shake the stable world of Luys with their free and uninhibited ways. Soon begins a game of seduction that ends up exposing the intellectual game of Luys.

5.8

Change of Sex

Young José María goes through a painful journey until he discovers that he is a transsexual.

5.7

The Blood Spattered Bride

A young newlywed woman begins to have disturbing nightmares just after settling into the old mansion that has belonged to her husband's family for centuries. When her sinister dreams come true, the innocent bride is caught in a maddening maze of unspeakable horrors.

6.3

Freedomfighters

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, the nun Maria is forced to flee her convent. She takes refuge in a brothel, until it is liberated by a woman's anarchist group. Maria joins the group and eventually goes to the front. The women's group faces the problems of fighting not only the nationalists, but also factions on the left seeking to impose a more traditional military structure.

5.4

Jealousy

A month before he's to marry Carmen, Antonio finds a photograph of a man with his arm on her shoulder. The photograph triggers jealousy: he questions Carmen, Carman's friend Cinta, and his friend Luis who introduced him to Carmen. Cinta tells Antonio the man's first name. Carmen tells him that the man meant nothing to her, and that the photograph was taken before she met Antonio. She loves Antonio and sets out to wipe the photograph from his mind through exuberant sex, but her ploy backfires and Antonio remains fixated. Slowly he finds out about the man, and about Carmen's past. Will jealousy consume this couple or can they find a way to kill the green-eyed monster?

5.7

Lute: Forge On or Die

In Spain of the 1960s, a poor family of quinquis - a nomadic ethnic group with a tradition as old as that of the gypsises of Spain but with even more obscure origins - have a nomadic life marked by poverty. The son, Eleuterio Sánchez Rodriguez, nicknamed "El Lute", steals some chickens and is condemned to six months in jail. El Lute moves to the slum outskirts of Madrid with his common law wife, Chelo, starting an itinerant life as a peddler of pots and pans and living in a quinqui shantytown. He gradually embarks upon as life of petty criminality, eventually participating in the theft of a jewelry store during which a bystander is killed.