Arguably the greatest filmmaker to emerge from Spain, Luis Buñuel in fact spent a great deal of his career working elsewhere—in Paris, initially, where he teamed with Salvador Dali to make the classic surrealist short Un Chien Andalou, then briefly and unsuccessfully in the US, and, for almost 20 years, in Mexico, where he fled to escape the Franco dictatorship. When Buñuel did return to Spanish filmmaking, with 1961's Viridiana, the result enraged Franco, who had the film banned. (It was not released in Spain until after the dictator's death, in 1977.) Even the official Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, weighed in, declaring it 'blasphamous'—leading to the director's splendidly dry retort (just before the film went on to win the Palme d'Or at Cannes): 'I didn't deliberately set out to be blasphemous . . . but then, Pope John XXIII is a far better judge of these things than I.'
