Although Paco Hoyos was born in Salamanca in the late 40s, he spent his childhood and teenage years in Buenos Aires, in an environment tremendously influenced by culture and cinema. In 1976, he returned to Spain to work in theatre production and promote concerts, before entering the field of cinema in 1984 with the distribution company Cinecompany. Paco Hoyos was one of the first distributors to believe in author cinema in Spain, putting his money on new, unknown directors when nobody else was willing to take the risk.

His nose for good films started functioning at an early age. In 1982, he purchased Yol before it won the Golden Palm; in 1983, he landed The Ballad of Narayama, and in 1985, When Father Was Away on Business, both of which also won awards at Cannes. He bought all of the Cannes Palm-winners from 1993 until 1998, with the exception of Pulp Fiction.

This talent for discovering directors continued to function for years. We only have to glance at the long list of films he has distributed to realise that it contains the first titles screened in Spain by Lars von Trier, Atom Egoyan, Peter Greenaway, Patrice Leconte, Shohei Imamura, Wayne Wang, Chen Kaige, Todd Haynes, Quentin Tarantino or Tran Anh Hung, without forgetting the recovery of classics like Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante, Abel Gance’s Napoléon, or his backing of traditional directors such as John Huston with The Dead or Godard with Nouvelle vague.