Saura was born in Huesca, Aragón, Spain on 4 January 1932. His father, Antonio Saura Pacheco, who came from Murcia, was an attorney and civil servant. His mother, Fermina Atares Torrente, was a concert Pianist. The second of their four children, Carlos had two younger sisters, Pilar and Angeles, and an older brother, Antonio Saura, who became a well known abstract expressionist Painter. From their parents, the four siblings received a liberal understanding education. Because his father was working for the Ministry of the Interior, the Saura family moved to Barcelona, Valencia and in 1953 to Madrid. Saura’s childhood was marked by the Spanish Civil War, during which Franco and his allies rebelled against the established republican government. Saura has vivid recollection of his childhood during the war, some of them later evoked in his films – the games he played, and the songs he sang, as well as darker memories of bombing and hunger, blood and death. He was taught to read by a priest – a relative whom his parents sheltered from anticlerical extremists. At the war’s end, Saura was separated from his parents and sent back to live with his maternal grandmother and aunts in Huesca. He described these relatives as “right wings and very religious” who imposed in the child the very antithesis of the kind of liberal education he had received in the republican zone.