Pedro Almodóvar

Pedro Almodóvar’s films are always highly anticipated at the Cannes Film Festival – even when the film is, in fact, a short film being screened out of competition.   The premiere of Pedro Almodóvar latest film, Strange Way of Life, was a highly sought-after ticket.

Tilda Swinton did not just come to the Lido to collect an award – the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement no less – and wear a great mask, she also starred in and introduced The Human Voice, a short film by Pedro Almodóvar, a man she has admired greatly for many years. Wearing a yellow Haider Ackerman blazer and her newly red hair, she paid tribute to the Spanish master:  “My relationship with Pedro Almodóvar’s cinema started with the cinema of William Wyler and George Cukor, Billy Wilder, and then Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown was the first time I saw his spirit and I’ve been entirely besotted by his cinema ever since.

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In 1983, Venice Festival director Gianluigi Rondi deemed Dark Habits, the debut film by a young Spanish director, “obscene”. Now, 36 years later, said Spanish director laughingly reminded the audience of that fact when he picked up the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in directing at the 76th Venice International Film Festival.

Venice 2019 is hot. Very hot indeed - and we're not talking about the quality of the films on offer, or the usual debates and controversies: temperatures are spectacularly high.

“Once they adopt you it’s forever,” quipped Pedro Almodóvar during his press conference about the affection shown him by audiences here. “No public is as loyal as the French.

Golden Globe winner Pedro Almodóvar returns to explore the theme of women in Julieta, his 20th feature film. But this time the way in which the Spanish director faces his subject is quite a departure from his earlier work.

After making the inconsequential airplane farce I’m So Excited! (arguably his weakest film in a career spanning 36 years), Pedro Almodovar is back on terra firma with Julieta, a femme-driven tale that justifies his title as a great woman's director, or rather a filmmaker who has specialized in telling emotionally touching stories about all kinds of women--of various ages, social classes, professions. Julieta has already opened in Spain, but it receives its high-prtofile international premiere at the Cannes Film Festival (in competition).

A book by Alice Munro, Runaway, appeared in the hands of Elena Anaya in a scene from Pedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I live In (2011). That same book, and specifically three of its stories, have inspired the script of Julieta, the latest film from the Spanish filmmaker.