ONCE UPON A TIME…ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER

Protagonists : 

• Pedro ALMODOVAR, director
• Penélope CRUZ, actress, role Sister of Rosa
• Agustin ALMODOVAR, Pedro’s brother and producer
• Cecilia ROTH, actress, role of Manuela
• Marisa PAREDES, actress, role of Huma
• Esther GARCIA, Production Manager
• Antonia SAN JUAN, actress, role of Agrado
• Didier ERIBON, sociologist

Portrait of a film: A nurse from Madrid is looking for the father of her son, who died in an accident at the age of 17. She finds him in Barcelona, as an AIDS-stricken transsexual prostitute. A portrait gallery of women who are facing life and its procession of dramas on their own, while the men are either absent, unstable or are having a sex change. This is Pedro Almodovar’s thirteenth film, which in 1999 won the prize for Best Director at Cannes and the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.

Portrait of an era: In the space of twenty years, customs liberation and cultural explosion have transformed the old Francoist Spain into an ultra-modern country, of which Barcelona, after the Madrid movida, has become the symbol: capital of nightlife, drugs and prostitution. Almodovar also addresses the very topical issue of gender and sexual identity: for him, there is a woman hidden in every man, and sex, like the family, is not just a matter of biology.

Portrait of a filmmaker: In 1999, Pedro Almodovar turned 50 years old. Born in a village in the Manche region, he arrives in Madrid at the age of 18, without any diploma or money, but with the intention of making films. He worked for a long time as a telephone employee, sang in a punk band and directed photo novels and underground short films before shooting his first feature film in 1980. A prolific author, he possessed a mixed and colourful aesthetic, marked by his taste for melodrama and the challenges of the times, and quickly became a symbol of New Spain’s avant-gardism.