The films of the Spanish director Luis Buñuel emphasize the hypocrisy of conventional morality.

Luis Buñuel was born in Calanda, the first of seven children in a prosperous, landowning family. After being educated by the Jesuits in Saragossa, he studied philosophy and literature at the University of Madrid.

In 1925 Buñuel traveled to Paris, where he came under the influence of the surrealist Andre Breton and the film director Jean Epstein. In 1928 he returned to Spain to collaborate with Salvador Dali on Un Chien Andalou (1928) and L'ege d'or (1929), two innovative surrealist films. The following year Buñuel journeyed to Hollywood. He completed only two short films during the next 10 years: Land without Bread (1932), a realistic study of Spanish provincial poverty, and Madrid 36 to Spain in Arms, a documentary supporting the Loyalist struggle against Franco.

During the early 1940s Buñuel supervised the production of anti-Nazi propaganda films, and in 1946 he wrote the screenplay for The Beast with Five Fingers. He then undertook a series of films set in Mexico. The initial efforts were poorly executed commercial pieces, but Los olvidados (1950), a mordant portrayal of an urchin gang brutalized beyond hope of recovery, was perhaps the first cinematic expression of Buñuel's emotional and intellectual vision.

In 1952 Buñuel directed in English The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, an imaginative translation of the Defoe classic. The same year El appeared; like several subsequent Buñuel works, this film is a bitter attack on Catholic Spain's sexual mores. After a succession of inconsequential efforts, he produced his first cinematic masterpiece, Nazarin (1958), a lyrically moving, atheistic parable on the impossibility of a modern Christ.

In 1961 Buñuel returned to Spain to produce his most celebrated work, Viridiana