Life meets art in Director Pedro Almodóvar’s 21st feature,
Pain and Glory (Dolor y Gloria).
This deeply personal film from Spain tells the story of Salvador Mallo (Antonio Banderas), a depressed director who is thinking of leaving filmmaking because of chronic health problems. A series of reencounters, both real and remembered, leads Mallo to reflect on the choices he's made, ruminate about creation and the difficulty of separating it from one’s own life. In recovering his past, he finds the urgent need to recount it, and in that need, he also finds his salvation.
Pain and Glory earned Almodóvar a Palme d'Or nomination at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival. The film is also Spain’s official entry for Best International Feature for the 92nd Academy Awards.
Following the Eastern Region Special Projects Committee’s Global Cinema Series screening in the DGA’s New York Theater on September 30, Almodóvar discussed the making of Pain and Glory in a conversation moderated by Director Kenneth Lonergan (Manchester by the Sea). He discussed the film in a conversation moderated by Global Cinema Subcommittee Chair Victoria Hochberg (The Chris Isaak Show) following the DGA Special Projects Global Cinema Screening in Los Angeles on October 29.
Almodóvar’s other directorial credits include the feature films Julieta, The Skin I Live In, Volver, Bad Education, The Flower of My Secret, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and Matador. He received an Academy Award nomination for Best Director in 2002 for his feature Talk to Her and won the Best Director prize at the 1999 Cannes Festival for All About My Mother, which also took home the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 2000.
You can listen to Almodóvar’s Q&A by clicking the podcast episode embedded below. You can find more DGA podcast episodes here.