©Photo by Marco Bertorello/AFP
Pedro Almodóvar, an iconic Spanish director, has left his unique mark on European cinema. From his underground beginnings in post-Franco Madrid to his worldwide recognition, he has built a prolific, colorful, and sensitive body of work that mirrors a Spain in the midst of transformation.
Born in 1949 in Calzada de Calatrava, a village in the La Mancha region, Pedro Almodóvar grew up under the Franco dictatorship. Sent to a Catholic boarding school in the hope that he would become a priest, this education did not suit him. Drawn to cinema, he arrived in Madrid at 17, intending to enroll in film school, only to find it closed by Franco’s orders. Lacking the means for long studies, Almodóvar found a job and bought himself a Super 8 camera. From 1974 to 1978, he made his first short films, earning a reputation in the post-Franco Madrid counterculture, known as the famous Movida.
His first feature film, Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls Like Mom (1980), launched his career. But it was Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) that catapulted him to the international stage. This colorful comedy, centered on women, already bore the hallmarks of his nonconformist, pop, and provocative style.
In the 1990s, films like High Heels (1991), Kika (1993), or Live Flesh (1997), his first collaboration with Penélope Cruz, confirmed his status as a major filmmaker. Almodóvar reached his peak with All About My Mother (1999). The film, a true ode to femininity, won numerous awards, including the Oscar and Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film. In 2002, Talk to Her earned him the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.
Throughout his career, Almodóvar has consistently explored the feminine psyche with sensitivity and empathy. His heroines, often eccentric and on the fringes of society, are strong and heartfelt women, resilient in the face of life’s challenges. The director draws inspiration from the figures who marked his childhood. “My passion for color is a response to my mother, who spent so many years in mourning and wearing black, which goes against nature,” he confides.
Unclassifiable, Almodóvar moves with virtuosity from comedy to drama, from noir to melodrama. His films, reflecting a Spain freeing itself from its past, break taboos and challenge conventions. Homosexuality, drugs, religion: no subject escapes his mischievous and insolent camera. Yet behind the provocation lies an infinite tenderness for his characters, bruised by life.
The 2000s were marked by further successes, such as Volver (2006), a family saga that earned its six actresses the Best Actress Award at Cannes, or Broken Embraces (2009), a Hitchcockian melodrama starring Penélope Cruz. In 2019, Pain and Glory, a semi-autobiographical film starring Antonio Banderas as an aging director, was nominated for Oscars.
In 2024, at 74, Almodóvar finally won the Golden Lion at Venice, one of the few major prizes that had eluded him, for The Room Next Door, his first film in English. A well-deserved crowning achievement for this master of European cinema who, over more than 40 years of career, has managed to establish a unique style—both popular and demanding—a mix of corrosive humor and raw emotion.
More than just a filmmaker, Pedro Almodóvar is undoubtedly the voice of an emancipated Spain, the flamboyant painter of the human soul in all its complexity.
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