1. Fernando Arrabal

Born on August 11th, 1932 in Melilla, Spain.

Arrabal is a filmmaker, poet, playwright and novelist. His complete filmography is the following: the essential masterpiece “Long Live Death” (1971), “I Will Walk Like A Crazy Horse” (1973), “The Guernica Tree” (1975), “The Emperor Of Peru” (1982), “The Automobile Graveyard” (1983), “Farewell, Babylon!” (1992) and “Borges, A Life In Poetry” (1998).

He was the founder of the Panic Movement in 1962, an artistic group influenced by the work of Luis Buñuel and Antonin Artaud and that took its name from Pan, the Greek god of music, the wild and friend of the mythical nymphs.

The group dedicated itself to make surrealist, loud performance art filled with chaos, sexuality, abjection and violence, with the intention of shocking and shaking the bourgeoisie and what they consider was the stale, middle-brow and boring state Art was in at the time.

Arrabal was also a pataphysicist, was a close friend of Andy Warhol and Tristan Tzara, and a member of André Breton’s Surrealist group.

In particular, “Long Live Death” is a work that must be seen by anyone who loves cinema. A Surrealist, experimental, avant-garde “coming-of-age” movie based on Arrabal’s own early life in Spain.

It concerns the story of Fando, a young boy whose fascist sympathizer mother turns in his anti-fascist father to the authorities, and all the fantasies in which the traumatized Fando engages, including ones of extreme, maddening and abject violence. It’s one of the greatest movies of the 70s, without a single doubt.

Arrabal has been a permanent resident of Paris, France for several decades now.

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