Jesús Franco (1930–2013) was a Spanish filmmaker. At a young age, Franco had a passion for comics and music, and followed his love of music, specifically jazz.[1]After his father found out about him working as a jazz musician, he enroled him a religious university in 1949. He later left these studies and went to the Madrid Royal Conservatory and then travelling to Paris in 1951 to where he wrote articles on stories which would be applied in his later films.[2]
In the early 1950s, he went to school at the Instituto de Investigaciones y Experiencias Cinematográficas (IIEC), later known as the Escuela Oficial de Cinematografía[3] He was suspended from this school in his second year, and later briefly enrolled in the Institut des hautes études cinématographiques in Paris.[4] By the mid-1950s, he was struggling to become a filmmaker.[5] He immediately became an assistant director for filmmakers such as Juan Antonio Bardem, Joaquín Luis Romero Marchent and León Klimovsky.[6] Towards the late 1950s, he began directing his own short films.[7] He directed his first feature film Tenemos 18 años in 1959 which was first released in 1961.[8] In the early 1960s Franco had was described in the Spanish press as a stylish, talented, sometimes provocative filmmaker. As his films became more provactive with their elements of eroticism and violence, he would leave Spain in 1969 and only return in 1979 after living and working in both France and Switzerland.[9][10] During this period, Franco would make films with popular actors such as Christopher Lee and Klaus Kinski. A vast number of his films, were made with his muse Lina Romay, whom he first met in 1971 and married in 2008.[11]
On returning to Spain, he found himself working with the lowest budgets of his career yet, leading him to make nearly 50 very low-budget features between 1980 and 1985. Between 1985 and 1990 his worked ranged from hardcore pornography to more traditional filmmaking with French film productions featuring actors like Christopher Lee and Mark Hamill. In the early 1990s, Franco's production work slowed down. Following the release of Killer Barbys (1996), he began on several projects again that were prominently shot-on-video projects.[12]
In 2008, the Spanish Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced it would award Franco the 2008 Lifetime Achievement Goya Award for "his extensive, rich and varied filmography, as well as his absolute dedication to the profession."[13] On accepting it, Franco dedicated the award to Juan Antonio Bardem, his partner Lina Romay, and to the Paris Cinémathéque.[9] Franco died in Malaga on 2 April 2013 at the age of 82. His final film Al Pereira vs. the Alligator Ladies (2013), premiered in Barcelona just two weeks before his death.[12]
Many of Jesús Franco's films were distributed with a consistent delay after their shooting often due to economic reasons as well systems related to Spanish rebate system.[8]
The films are listed by their year of first release and the years when the film were being shot to assist in understanding the chronology of Franco's films. Films are listed by their most common English language title, whether it be home video or theatrical. When no English title is available, the title the film uses its original release from its predominant production country.