Almodóvar president of the 70th edition jury

This year the Film Festival will take place from 17 to 28 May 2017 , and it is not as a competitor that Pedro Almodóvar the Spanish director will climb the steps, but as president of the jury of this 70th Festival.

It was on 31 January, well ahead of other years that Thierry Frémaux the artistic director of the Festival announced that the Spanish director will succeed Australian George Miller.

Live from Madrid Pedro Amodovar (67) expressed his joy:

« I am very happy to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival in this privileged position.

I'm grateful and honored and I'm so nervous!

Being president of the jury is a heavy responsibility and I hope to live up to the circumstances. I can tell you that I will dedicate myself body and soul to this task, which is both a pleasure and a privilege. »

 

 

Last year for the 69th edition, this « Subscriber » FIF , was still present with its film Julieta (official selection 2016)

The filmmaker had already been a member of the jury in 1992 under the chairmanship of Gérard Depardieu. A great regular of the Croisette, Pedro Almodovar has been named five times for Everything about my mother, Volver, Broken Ointments, La piel que habito et Julieta. Rewarded twice, however, he never won the Golden Palm

Pedro Almodóvar was born in Calzada de Calatrava in 1949, Ciudad Real province. At the age of 8, he emigrated with his family to Extremadura, and studied until the baccalaureate with the Salesian and Franciscan fathers, whose memories he kept bitter. Its « poor education » He will only be taught to lose his faith in God. It was at this time in Caceres that he began assiduously attending the cinemas. « Over the years, the warmth of this improvised home has become a paradigm of what cinema means to me ».

At 16, he moved to Madrid, alone and without money, but with a concrete project: to study and make cinema. Nevertheless, it is impossible to register at the Official Cinema School, Franco having just closed it. We are then at the end of the 1960s and, despite the dictatorship, Madrid represents a Almodóvar the city of culture and freedom: « I was born in a bad time for Spain, but very good for cinema. », he will say later.

In Madrid, the young man lives in small jobs and succeeds in buying his first Super-8 camera only when he gets his first serious job from the Spanish National Telephone Company. He will spend twelve years as an administrative assistant. During these years, he will be in direct contact with the middle class of his country, and will be able to study the tragedies and misery of the consumer society. In the evening, Pedro wrote and made theatre with Los Goliardos ("Les Débuchés"), made shorts in Super-8. He collaborates on various underground journals, written, is part of a group of punk-rock parodic: « Almodóvar y McNamara ».

After a first long in Super-8 in 1978 Folle... Crazy... Tim! in which already appears his agry Carmen Maura, the release of his first "real" film Pepi, Luci. Bom And The Other Girls Of The District coincides with the beginning of democracy, relayed by the famous Movida, Spanish cultural revival following the removal of Franco. The cinema of the young director is then filled with this fury of life bariolée: sexual debauchery, drugs and music.

Pedro Almodóvar regularly, his circle of fans gradually expanding – notably thanks to Labyrinth Passions, drama of gay jealousy that reveals a beginner: Antonio Banderas – until finally crossing borders at the time of Matador, film written with four hands with José Ferrero, and breaking with the tone of his previous films. Matador allows Almodóvar – as to its fetish actor Banderas – to fall into the category of « hopes of Spanish cinema ».

 

Pedro Almodóvar from recognition to success

But the film that really makes known Almodóvar on the world stage, in addition to the beautiful The Law of Desire, will Women Border of the Nerfs CrisisWith Carmen Maura and Rossy De Palma. Almodóvar begins its phase of colorful and eccentric films that will make its reputation outside its borders. He then toured with his new icon Victoria Abril, star of theAttach Me!, partner of Marisa Paredes in Needle Heels, or creature passed under the expert hands of Jean-Paul Gaultier in Kika. The actress succeeds Maura in this pass of three whose last kitsch summit marks the end of an era.

It's only with The Flower Of My Secret that the director, having pushed the climax of situations and passions to the furthest, returns to a cinema more intimate, more introspective.

In Chair and Os, which tells of the involvement in a criminal gear of an ex-basketter become paraplegic, turns out to be a beautiful incursion ofAlmodóvar in the black film, which does not prevent him from instilling his recurring leg: exacerbation of feelings, love tensions, colorful characters, dramatic intrigues... Characteristics still present in the following film, All About My Mother, which rallies an impressive number of awards: Award for Directing in Cannes, Oscar and Caesar for Best Foreign Film, Golden Globe or even seven Goya.

After giving up his gay western in the United States, the director stays in Spain and shoots Talk to her, hailed as a masterpiece and rewarded all over the world... Except in Spain. In 2004, he Bad Education, one of his most intimate films, which goes back to his young years spent with Franciscans.

He then brushed in Volver the portrait of three generations of women in the working class, and finds in front of his camera after 17 years of absence his first age, Carmen Maura.

Within Brackets, Pedro Almodóvar elaborates with virtuosity, like Talk to her, an intrigue in which the past and the present continue to respond, and whose subject – a director of cinema which has changed his existence with a tragically interrupted love story fourteen years ago – enriched another underlying love story, that of the Madrid master with cinema. In the role of a fatal woman abused by life, Penelope Cruz is once again her bitterness. The film is presented in competition at the next Cannes Film Festival.

In 2010, Pedro Almodóvar finds Antonio Banderas in a drama about revenge in The Piel That Habito which will be presented in competition at the 64th Cannes International Film Festival 2011.

Three years later, the director returns to humor with the crazy comedy Passenger lovers whose criticisms are mixed. In the same year, he receivedEuropan Achievement in World Cinema for her entire career at the 2013 European Film Awards.

In 2016, he was back on the cruise where his film Julieta is presented in competition during the 69th Cannes International Film Festival 2016.

 

Article: Almodóvar