Mexican actor and director Diego Luna will receive the City of Huesca Carlos Saura Award at the 50th edition of the Huesca International Film Festival. One of the world’s most prominent names in the Ibero-American audiovisual industry will be recognized for his career and projection at the event’s opening ceremony on June 10. The great filmmaker from Huesca, Carlos Saura, will be the one to hand over the award to the interpreter of titles as iconic as ‘Y tu madre tú’, ‘Frida’, ‘Narcos: México’ or ‘Rogue One: A Star Wars Story’.
With more than a hundred productions to his credit and awards as prominent as the best actor in Venice or at the Platino Awards, Luna has developed his career as a director, screenwriter and producer in parallel, facets that have also earned him an Ariel Award, the audience award at SXSW and recognition at other top-level festivals such as Mar del Plata, Sao Paolo or Edinburgh.
“It is one of the names with capital letters of the seventh art in our language, with a trajectory where he has managed to combine auteur cinema with great Hollywood blockbusters”, argues Rubén Moreno, director of the Huesca festival. Also, the festival and Luna have a common bond as the first short film in which the actor participated (The Last End of the Year) won the Danzante de Oro Award in 1992.
Born in Mexico City in 1979, Diego Luna has been linked to culture and cinema since birth. He is the son of the famous Mexican architect, set designer, professor and academic Alejandro Luna and the renowned artist and costume designer Fiona Alexander (of English origin and who worked with Carlos Saura on ‘Antonieta’). His debut in front of the cameras was produced in 1992 with the short film ‘The last end of the year’, a work directed by Javier Bourges that would win the Golden Dancer at the event in Huesca (in the 20th edition of the festival).
During the 90’s participated in soap operas as ‘El prize mayor’ or ‘El grandad y yo’, along with his childhood friend, fellow actor Gael García Bernal; works that he would alternate with feature films such as ‘Ámbar’, ‘Morena’, ‘A thread of blood’, ‘El cometa’ or ‘A sweet smell of death’. The new century would start with outstanding titles like ‘Before night falls’. But great international recognition It would come from the hand of Alfonso Cuarón and the iconic ‘Y tu madre tú’. The film, considered a benchmark of new Mexican cinema and nominated for an Oscar, was presented at the Venice International Film Festival where Diego himself was awarded along with García Bernal as best young performers.
His time in Hollywood has been plagued by critical and commercial successes, as well as independent films, with titles such as ‘Frida’, starring Salma Hayek; ‘The Terminal’, by Steven Spielberg, and with Tom Hanks in the title role; the science fiction blockbuster ‘Elysium’; ‘A Rainy Day in New York’, directed by Woody Allen, ‘Open Range’, by Kevin Costner; or ‘Milk’, by Gus Van Sant. An innate talent that has also been reflected on the small screenwhere he has shone in series like ‘Narcos: Mexico’, where he recreated Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo (one of the founders of the Guadalajara cartel), a role that earned him the Platinum Award for best performance.
Diego Luna’s passion for the seventh art extends to all his professional fields and for this reason in 2007 he would launch himself into directing. His first incursion would be with the documentary ‘JC Chávez’, presented at the Tribeca Festival. Three years later, his debut fiction film would arrive, ‘Abel’, a work written and directed by the artist himself that went through such important competitions as Sundance, Cannes or San Sebastián (where he won the Horizontes Latinos Award) to later crown him with the Ariel Award for best original screenplay in his own land. Since then he has continued to develop his passion behind the scenes in multiple shorts, features and TV series acclaimed by the specialized press and the public.
Along with his artistic facet, he has also developed various projects to support other filmmakers. So much so that in 2008 he co-founded Canana Films with Gael García Bernal. Ten years later, they would return to the fray to launch La Corriente del Golfo, another production company dedicated to the development of community projects in all kinds of formats: cinema, theater, television or podcast.
Since 2019, the City of Huesca Carlos Saura Award has had the endorsement of the master from Huesca himself, who was the first to collect it in 1991. Names such as Fernando Trueba, Arturo Ripstein or Julio Medem would succeed him in the list of winners until in 2014 he was reformulated, acquiring a new prism. Under the new nomenclature and with the idea of rewarding talent and projection, award winners appear as Adriana Ugarte, Silvia Abascal, Paula Ortiz, Leticia Dolera, Aura Garrido, Isabel Peña and Rodrigo Sorogoyen, Anna Castillo or the also Mexican Michel Franco last year.
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