Agustí Villaronga
Villaronga in 2020
Born	Agustí Villaronga Riutort (1953-03-04)4 March 1953 Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Died	23 January 2023(2023-01-23) (aged 69) Barcelona, Spain
Occupation(s)	Film director, screenwriter, actor
Years active	1976–2023

Agustí Villaronga Riutort (Catalan pronunciation:[əɣusˈtiβiʎəˈɾoŋɡə]; 4 March 1953 – 23 January 2023)^[1][2] was a Spanish film director, screenwriter and actor.^[3] He directed several feature films, a documentary, three projects for television and three shorts. His filmMoon Child was entered into the1989 Cannes Film Festival.^[4]

His auteur approach to filmmaking was described byScreenDaily as demostrative of "a keen insight into human pain and cruelty".^[5] In 2011 he won theGoya Award for Best Director forBlack Bread. The Catalan-language film was selected as the Spanish entry for theBest Foreign Language Film at the84th Academy Awards,^[6] but it did not make the final shortlist.^[7]

Agustí Villaronga was born on 4 March 1953 inPalma. His grandparents were itinerant puppeteers and his father was a child of theSpanish Civil War, a background that would resurface repeatedly in the director's filmography.^[8] Since childhood, his father encouraged his love for films and from early in his life he wanted to become a film director. He worked as an actor and made some shorts.^{[citation needed]}

Villaronga made his directorial debut in 1986 with the filmIn a Glass Cage, which was selected by theBerlin film festival receiving critical praise and many awards. The plot follows a former Nazi doctor, now paralyzed and depending on an iron lung to live, who begins to be taken care of by a young man, one of the children he abused during the war.In a Glass Cage already shows some of the key elements in Villaronga's filmography: a disturbed childhood marked by violence, an early discovery of sexuality.^{[citation needed]}

His second film,Moon Child (1989), is about a child who goes to Africa to join a tribe awaiting the arrival of white child God.^[9] In 1992 he made a documentary,Al-Andalus, produced by Sogetel and theMoMa ofNew York City.^[10][11] For some years Villaronga tried unsuccessfully to find financing to adapt a novel byMercè Rodoreda,La mort i la primavera.^[12] Instead he had to take some commission works. One of these wasEl pasajero clandestino, an adaptation of aGeorges Simenon novel, that lacked the personal characteristics of his filmography.^[13][14]

Called by actressMaría Barranco, Villaronga directed the 1997 horror film99.9, which won the award for Best Cinematography at the 1997Sitges Film Festival.^[15] In 2000, Villaronga came back with a project of his own:El mar, a story set inMallorca about three former childhood friends, traumatized by the violence they experienced during the Spanish Civil War, that are reunited ten years later as young adults. The key elements in Villaronga's filmography are present in this story: childhood, sexual awakening, homosexuality and violence.^[16][17]

In 2002, Villaronga co-directed withLydia Zimmermann andIsaac Pierre Racine the filmAro Tolbukhin: In the Mind of a Killer. In 2005 he directed a music video for French superstarMylène Farmer's songFuck Them All.^[18] In 2007 he madeDespués de la lluvia, a made for television project adapting a stage play. It was only until 2010 withBlack Bread, when Villaronga finally achieved wider appeal. This film, winner of nineGoya Awards including best film and best director, tells the story of an eleven year old boy who growing up in the harsh period of the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War inCatalonia's countryside discovers the world of lies around him.^{[citation needed]}

Villaronga followedBlack Bread's success withA Letter to Evita, a TV miniseries co-produced by TV3, which recounts a real episode in the life ofEva Perón while visiting Spain in the late 1940s.^{[citation needed]}

Villaronga was openly gay.^[17] He died on 22 January 2023 inBarcelona, at the age of 69.^[19] At the time of his death, he had one project,Stormy Lola, outstanding. It was shot in 2022, and was his first comedy film.^[20][21][1]

Villaronga received theGold Medal of Merit in the Fine Arts on 1 December 2022.^[22]

• Agustí Villaronga atIMDb

• 1953 births
• 2023 deaths
• 20th-century Spanish male actors
• Best Director Goya Award winners
• Film directors from Catalonia
• Catalan-language film directors
• French-language film directors
• Spanish gay writers
• Spanish gay actors
• Spanish LGBTQ film directors
• Gay screenwriters
• Spanish LGBTQ screenwriters
• Spanish male screenwriters
• Actors from Palma de Mallorca
• Spanish-language film directors
• Spanish male film actors
• 20th-century Spanish screenwriters
• 20th-century Spanish male writers
• 21st-century Spanish LGBTQ people
• 21st-century Spanish screenwriters

• CS1 French-language sources (fr)
• CS1 Spanish-language sources (es)
• CS1 Catalan-language sources (ca)
• Articles with short description
• Short description is different from Wikidata
• Use dmy dates from July 2020
• Articles with hCards
• Pages with Catalan IPA
• All articles with unsourced statements
• Articles with unsourced statements from January 2023