When the Spanish film director Carlos Saura, who has died aged 91, completed his first feature, Los Golfos (The Delinquents), a ferocious story of six impoverished children from the Madrid slums, it was invited to the 1960 Cannes film festival.
However, its implicit critique of the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco meant that it was forbidden in Spain for another couple of years. Taking his films outside Spain to bypass censorship was a strategy Saura adopted several times, although – an awkward contradiction that he recognised – his films’ success abroad made the dictatorship seem more liberal.
