“Goya has always been my favourite painter,” declares Saura, who began his career as an assistant to Luis Buñuel and, in his early films (shot under the Franco dictatorship), developed an elliptical way of treating the social problems of fascist Spain which enabled him to circumvent the censors. No surprise, then, that he found in the life of Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828) - which spanned one of the most turbulent periods in modern Spanish and European history - subject matter that linked both phases of his career. Goya in Bordeaux is a film about an artist who was at the heart of historical change - the perfect subject for a Saura film.

“There are some people who live at the centre of the hurricane and who seek to express the convulsions of a world in transformation,” says the director. “Goya was a witness to and part of a country where intolerance, disease and war were part of everyday life. I don’t believe we have more reliable testimony to the violence of war than his engravings. There is neither sentimentality nor tenderness in them - simply a powerful vision which tries to express the horrors which he experienced and imagined.”

Saura’s film is told in flashback by the 82-year-old painter (played by veteran Spanish actor Francisco Rabal), now living in exile in Bordeaux with the last of his lovers, Leocadia Zorrilla de Weiss (Eulalia Ramón). It is a life in which international fame and the major and minor betrayals of Spanish court politics have been inextricably linked. And there has been passion, too, as the elderly Goya looks back over the ambitions of his youth (in which he is played by Jose Coronado), and on his one great love affair: with the Duchess of Alba (Maribel Verdú), subject of several of his best-known paintings.

Storaro with Paco Rabal

Then, at the age of 46, an illness turned him completely deaf and Goya retired from public life, producing a series of increasingly dark works, some of them painted directly onto the walls of his studio in the Quinta del Sordo (Estate of the Deaf), as if to stress that they were for him and him alone. Seen now, these paintings are clear forerunners of the key developments in 20th-century art, despite having been painted in the first decade of the 19th century.

“‘I see neither line nor colour, only shadows moving back and forth’ - that’s what Goya said when he gave his acceptance speech for the Academy,” notes Saura. “My brother Antonio, who was a Goya expert [he died shortly before shooting commenced], considered those words to be the clearest statement he knew on the subject of modern painting.”