Academy Award winner Pedro Almodóvar’s latest film is set to open the 2021 Venice International Film Festival!
As first reported by The Hollywood Reporter, The Oscar-winning Spanish filmmaker’s latest feature Madres Paralelas starring Academy Award winner Penélope Cruz, Milena Smit, Israel Elejalde and Aitana Sánchez-Gijón has been revealed as the official curtain raiser on the Lido on September 1st.
Almodóvar stated,
“I was born as a film director in 1983 in Venice in the Mezzogiorno Mezzanotte section,”
“Thirty-eight years later I am called to open the festival. I cannot explain the joy and the honor, and how much this means to me without falling into complacency. I am very grateful to the festival for this recognition and hope to be up to it.”
Festival director Alberto Barbera said:
“I am grateful to Pedro Almodóvar for having given us the privilege of opening the film festival with his new movie, an intense and sensitive portrait of two women as they contend with a pregnancy with unpredictable consequences, women’s solidarity, and sexuality that is experienced in full freedom and without hypocrisy, all against the backdrop of a reflection on the ineluctable need for truth that is to be unwaveringly pursued.”
Madres Paralelas tells the story of
two mothers who enter the same hospital ward to give birth. Both are single and got pregnant by accident. Janis, middle-aged, doesn’t regret it and she is exultant while the other, Ana, an adolescent, is scared, repentant and traumatized. Janis tries to encourage her while they move like sleepwalkers along the hospital corridors. The few words they exchange in these hours will create a very close link between the two, which chance will undertake to develop and complicate in such a decisive way that it will change the lives of both.
