Almodóvar's English short with Tilda Swinton to air in October
Tuesday, September 22, 2020 @ 5:07 PM
CULT film director Pedro Almodóvar's first production in English is due to hit cinemas in Spain on October 21.
The Human Voice, a 30-minute short starring British-Australian actress Tilda Swinton, is based upon a story by French author Jean Cocteau – of Les Enfants Terribles fame, and who also provided the inspiration for one of Almodóvar's most famous early melodramas, Mujeres al Borde de un Ataque de Nervios ('Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown').
But the director's first film in a foreign language is radically different from Mujeres al Borde – the 1988 hit was very much a product of its time, just 13 years after dictator General Franco's death and a decade after democracy was enshrined in law through Spain's Constitution, a period of rapid social change which brought with it the end of an iron-fisted censorship on the arts, media and education.
Back then, authors, painters, singers, songwriters, scriptwriters, screen and theatre directors and journalists, who could have been jailed in the past for any works that 'questioned' public authority or the Church or were considered 'indecent', had suddenly gone mad – released from their chains, they lurched in completely the opposite direction and all that had been banned came galloping to the forefront.
Read more at thinkSPAIN.com