Luis Buñuel stood at the back of a Paris theater in 1929 with stones in his pockets, ready to hurl them at hecklers during the premiere of Un Chien Andalou. Instead, the elite audience applauded, and the surrealist provocateur found himself absorbed by the very establishment he wanted to insult. This episode traces the life of the Spanish-Mexican filmmaker from a devout Jesuit-educated boyhood in Calanda and Zaragoza, through his rejection of the church at sixteen, to the legendary student residence in Madrid where he lived alongside Salvador Dalí and Federico García Lorca.

The story follows Buñuel through the riots and Vatican fury over L’Age d’Or, the banned poverty documentary Las Hurdes, exile after the Spanish Civil War, Dalí’s betrayal that cost him his job at the Museum of Modern Art, and nearly two decades directing 21 films in the Mexican studio system. It also covers the Viridiana affair, in which Franco’s government proudly accepted the Palme d’Or at Cannes for a film that turned out to be a subversive anti-clerical masterpiece, and closes with the theological conversations Buñuel held with a Jesuit friend in his final days in Mexico City in 1983.

• How a Jesuit education gave Buñuel the logical tools he later turned against the church
• The making of Un Chien Andalou and L’Age d’Or with Salvador Dalí, and why applause frustrated him more than riots
• Exile, blacklisting in New York, and a near-violent confrontation with Dalí over his autobiography
• Why Buñuel came to see Mexican commercial melodramas as a Trojan horse for radical ideas, including Los Olvidados
• The Viridiana heist at Cannes, the Oscar for The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, and what constraints can teach any creative