CARLOS ATANES is a Spanish film director and playwright. But he is also an enfant terrible, a rebel and a maverick. The prestigious website Bad Lit: The Underground Film Journal has stated that he is the Spain's underground master. Let's look at a summary of his life:

Atanes comes into life in Barcelona in 1971. Throughout his serene childhood he develops his talent drawing comics, creating theater performances at school, encouraging his friends to shoot a film in Super 8 and founding a very transgressive punk music band. When he is 12 years old is severely reprimanded by fathers Piarists, threatening him with expulsion from the school in retaliation for providing his classmates photocopies of pornographic comics that he draws (it was a well organized distribution with which he does well out of a deal).

He starts to write and direct independent films in 1987. In late 1988 he began film studies, culminating after a few years with fireworks in a four-week stay in the south of France, where there was the shooting of a short film in 35 mm in collaboration with the University of Bristol and Montpellier. Atanes was the director of photography of the film. A few days after his protests against the very poor conditions of stay are rewarded with his immediate expulsion. The project ends, inevitably, with the emergency hospitalization of several crew members.

During the 1990's Atanes makes many short films, documentaries, experimental videos and video installations, publishes underground magazines, organizes events, lectures and participates in debates (some of them memorable, like the one held at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona that ends in riot and the police arresting two speakers who seek to flee naked climbing the facade of the building opposite) and founds successively several associations: of short film directors, video artists, pseudo-situationist art and even a group of Galician filmmakers. All these efforts inevitably fail. Towards the end of the decade his films are progressively gaining more transgressor hints. Distaste samples at public screenings and even ashtrays flying towards the screen are not uncommon. The anthology "Codex Atanicus" collects the most significant works of this period.

After the turn of the century, he decides to settle down and focus on writing novels, plays, essays (like the film direction handbook "Los Trabajos del Director") and making feature length movies, of which he wrote and directed four to date: the dystopia "FAQ" (2004), the space adventure "PROXIMA" (2007), the weird fantasy and fetish musical "Maximum Shame" (2010) and the unclassifiable pornophilosophical delirium "Gallino, the Chicken System" (2012). Another feature movie project is deserted due to lack of funding, "Aleister Crowley in the Mouth of Hell", although the script was recently published as paperback. It is based on the life of famous British magician and Sexual Magick (Atanes is a recognized expert in Sexual Magick as he revealed many times, including his appearance on popular Spanish TV program Cuarto Milenio).



Atanes's filmography is a peculiar mix of fantasy, surrealism, eroticism and oddness. The audience's reception is always polarised and it is systematically and permanently ignored by Spanish film festivals. But it also achieves European and American film festivals recognition (Great Prize from the Athens Panorama of Independent Filmmakers and nominations from European Fantastic Film Festivals Federation, the Tel-Aviv's Icon, the BUT Film Festival in The Netherlands, and so on) and acclaim from American underground film reviewers. Atanes' style (very singular, commonly known as atanic) is indebted, in his own words, from a variety of sources. Maybe the principal one is the 1970s movies, a decade that he admires because he feels it gave the most daring and amazing movies. Werner Herzog, Federico Fellini, David Lynch, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Brian de Palma, Marco Ferreri, Ken Russell, Luis Buñuel, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ivan Zulueta, Roman Polanski and John Waters, among others, made during those years their films more visceral, extravagant and visionary. Not to mention the genre of science fiction of that period, with which Atanes maintains an indelible emotional bond.

Throughout his entire career Atanes surrounds himself with regular contributors who have been involved in his projects with stubborn recidivism, whether theatrical or film. People as the producer Marta Timón, the actors Manuel Solàs, María Kaltembacher and Arantxa Peña, the composers Marc Álvarez and Xavier Tort and the photographer Jacobo Medrano.

His connection with theater is limited for years to chat with friends actors after the curtain drop, to write some texts and to design lighting for other people's plays. But following his move to Madrid in 2007, his passion for the stage, which has remained latent, resurfaces as frenetic activity. From 2011 and in just two years he mounts his own science-fiction play "La cobra en la cesta de mimbre" (Sala AZarte), delegates to Juan José Afonso the direction of his comedy "El hombre de la pistola de nata" (Teatro Arenal), writes three plays and stages two short pieces, "La Depredadora" and "La Lluvia". In May of 2013 the short piece "Romance Bizarro" (in Madrid's Microteatro) and the comedy "Secretitos" (in the CNC / Sala Mirador, also in Madrid) will be released, they both directed by himself.

At present he lives in Madrid trying not to get into too much trouble, he is working in new film and theatre projects and also keeps up-to-date a Facebook page, a Twitter profile and a news blog. He also writes articles for the site Teatro a Teatro regularly.