A woman tries to rebuild her relationship with the daughter who abandoned her years earlier in Director Pedro Almodóvar’s new drama, Julieta.
The film from Spain tells the story of Julieta, a middle-aged woman living in Madrid. A chance encounter with the former best friend of her long-lost daughter, Antia, causes Julieta to try to find a way to reconnect while also reflecting on their past in search of an answer to why the girl deserted her 12 years earlier after the death of their respective husband and father.
Almodóvar’s 20th feature explores the complexity of fate, guilt, the mystery that leads us to erase people we love from our lives as if they had never existed, and a mother’s struggle to survive uncertainty. Julieta earned a nomination for the Palme d'Or at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival.
Following the Eastern Region Special Projects Committee’s Global Cinema Series screening in the DGA’s New York Theater on December 1, Almodóvar discussed the making of Julieta in a conversation moderated by Jonathan Demme (Ricki and the Flash).
Almodóvar’s other directorial works include the feature films 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; as well as the short films Salomé, Sexo va, sexo viene, Blancor, and Film Politico. 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 all DGA podcast episodes here.