Vicente Aranda - Early Life

Early Life

Vicente Aranda Ezquerra was born in Barcelona on 9 November 1926. He was the youngest son in a large and impoverished family who had emigrated from Aragón to Barcelona twenty years before he was born. He barely knew his father, an itinerant photographer, who died when the child was only seven years old. The Spanish Civil War, in which his family took the side of the losing Republicans, marked his childhood. Thinking that the war was going to be more bearable in a small town than in Barcelona, the family moved early in the war to Peñalba, his mother's native village. The dire situation there, close to the Aragon's front, forced them to come back to Barcelona in 1938.

After the war ended, Aranda spent a lot of time in the local movie theatre, much against the wishes of his mother, who took to smelling him on his return for traces of the disinfectant that was sprayed in cinemas of the time. He never finished his studies. At age thirteen, he had to begin to work in order to help his family. He had a number of different jobs in his home town, trying a multitude of trades before following his brother Palmiro to Venezuela in 1952. He emigrated for economical and political reasons. In Venezuela, Aranda worked as a cargo technician for an American shipping business and later became responsible for programs at NCR. After seven years, he came back to Spain in 1959.

Wealthy and married upon his return, he had the initial desire to become a novelist, but found that he lacked enough talent as a writer. He fell in with the cultural elite of Catalonia and was encouraged to try his hand at filmmaking, even after being denied access to the School of Cinema in Madrid because he never graduated from high school. In Barcelona and completely self-taught, Aranda found the way to direct his first feature film.

Aranda started directing films late in life, at almost forty and did not reach international success until his 60s, nevertheless, he has had a long and prolific career making twenty-seven films in more than forty years as director. Vicente Aranda is married to Teresa Font, his second wife who is thirty years his junior. She has been editor of his movies since the mid 1980s; they have two daughters.