Agustí Villaronga

Agustí Villaronga Riutort (Catalan pronunciation: [əɣusˈti βiʎəˈɾoŋɡə]; 4 March 1953 – 23 January 2023) was a Spanish film director, screenwriter and actor. He directed several feature films, a documentary, three projects for television and three shorts. His film Moon Child was entered into the 1989 Cannes Film Festival. His auteur approach to filmmaking was described by ScreenDaily as demostrative of "a keen insight into human pain and cruelty". In 2011 he won the Goya Award for Best Director for Black Bread. The Catalan-language film was selected as the Spanish entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 84th Academy Awards, but it did not make the final shortlist. Agustí Villaronga was born on 4 March 1953 in Palma. His grandparents were itinerant puppeteers and his father was a child of the Spanish Civil War, a background that would resurface repeatedly in the director's filmography. Since childhood, his father encouraged his love for films and from early in his life he wanted to become a film director. He worked as an actor and made some shorts. Villaronga made his directorial debut in 1986 with the film In a Glass Cage, which was selected by the Berlin film festival receiving critical praise and many awards. The plot follows a former Nazi doctor, now paralyzed and depending on an iron lung to live, who begins to be taken care of by a young man, one of the children he abused during the war. In a Glass Cage already shows some of the key elements in Villaronga's filmography: a disturbed childhood marked by violence, an early discovery of sexuality. His second film, Moon Child (1989), is about a child who goes to Africa to join a tribe awaiting the arrival of white child God. In 1992 he made a documentary, Al-Andalus, produced by Sogetel and the MoMa of New York City. For some years Villaronga tried unsuccessfully to find financing to adapt a novel by Mercè Rodoreda, La mort i la primavera. Instead he had to take some commission works. One of these was El pasajero clandestino, an adaptation of a Georges Simenon novel, that lacked the personal characteristics of his filmography. Called by actress María Barranco, Villaronga directed the 1997 horror film 99.9, which won the award for Best Cinematography at the 1997 Sitges Film Festival.