2024-08-24 08:47:03
Oscar-winning director Pedro Almodóvar will receive a lifetime achievement award at the San Sebastián film festival in Spain next month. The organizers will give it to him at a time when the seventy-four-year-old creator is sending his first film shot in English to cinemas, writes the AFP agency.
The film called La habitación de al lado, in English The Room Next Door, will also be shown in Czech cinemas on December 5. It tells the story of two 60-somethings who became friends in their youth when they worked for the same magazine.
“However, Ingrid became a writer, while Martha embarked on the path of a war correspondent. They were separated by life,” reads the caption of the film, in which the women are brought together again years later by an “extreme but strangely sweet situation.”
The heroines were played by famous actresses Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore. According to Variety.com, the film is loosely based on Almodóvar’s three-year-old drama Parallel Mothers.
The director will officially present the film for the first time at the turn of August and September at the Venice festival, after which he will bring it to San Sebastián at the end of September. There he will be presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award by the leading actor, Tilda Swinton.
“His films are extraordinary because of how he writes female characters, how he directs actors, how boldly he expresses himself on topics related to the LGBTQI+ world, faith, sex, addiction or historical memory, not to mention his political activism,” the festival organizers explain why they decided Appreciate Almodóvar.
Director Pedro Almodóvar at the 2021 Venice Film Festival. | Photo: Reuters
They also draw attention to the characteristic visual aspect of the director’s films. “Its personality shines through in everything from the set design to the soundtrack,” they add.
The artist has already announced that he will accept the award. “It’s an honor. In San Sebastián, they can celebrate film with the appropriate enthusiasm,” the director praises the organizers of the show, which has been held annually since 1953. This year’s edition will last from September 20 to 28.
Pedro Almodóvar rose to global fame in 1999 with the drama All About My Mother, for which he won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. It told the story of a woman dealing with the sudden death of her teenage son, who was hit by a car.
Three years later, the director won the Oscar for the screenplay of the film Talk to Her about the unusual rapprochement of two men whose beloved women are in a coma.
Almodóvar comes from the town of Calzada de Calatrava. As a sixteen-year-old, he arrived in Madrid without family and without money, with the aim of studying and making films. But at that time he could not enroll in the school of cinematography, because the dictator Francisco Franco had just closed it. Instead, the boy played in a parody punk rock band, performed in the theater, wrote scripts and short stories for newspapers and magazines.
Pedro Almodóvar is one of the most famous living European directors. | Photo: Reuters
He bought his first camera at the age of 22 from the salary of an administrative worker of a telephone company. He made his feature-length debut, the tragicomedy Pepi, Luci, Bom and other girls from the party, in 1980. He is said to have been inspired by Hollywood melodramas that revolve around the main female character.
“I grew up among women. I remember men fleetingly. They were never at home, they spent the time when they weren’t working in bars,” Almodóvar explained years ago why most of his films have female protagonists, not male protagonists. The director had two older sisters and still has a younger brother, Augustín, who has been producing all his works since 1986.
His most frequent collaborators include the actresses Penélope Cruz, Cecilia Roth, Carmen Maura, Rossy de Palma, Julieta Serrano or the now deceased Chus Lampreave. However, he often casts, for example, Antonio Banderas in his films, who was last in 2021 the star of his partially autobiographical Pain and Glory.
Almodóvar does not like to remember certain stages of his life. “That’s where I lost my faith in God,” he said, for example, of growing up in a Salesian and Franciscan college. “I didn’t like my childhood and I had no interest in remembering it, let alone making movies about it,” he added. He exposed the church in the film Bad Education from 2004, in which he also exposed the sexual abuse of boys in the church dormitory.
Almodóvar has always openly talked about his homosexuality, which he reflects in some of his works. The director lives in Madrid with a friend, an actor and a photographer.
Video: Trailer z filmu The Room Next Door
Pedro Almodóvar’s new film in English called The Room Next Door will be shown in Czech cinemas on December 5. | Video: Sony Pictures Classics