Curated by
Marco Berti and Francesca Pappalardo, Palazzo Esposizioni Roma

Promoted by
Rome the Capital City’s Cultural Affairs Department and Azienda Speciale Palaexpo

Our gratitude goes to
CG Entertainment, Cineteca Lucana, Cineteca Milano, Eagle Pictures, Imago Company Srl, Park Circus, Warner Bros. Entertainment Italia

To paraphrase that wonderful singer Mina, Pedro Almodóvar burst onto the scene without warning, capturing audiences’ hearts from the 1980s on and literally exploding onto the European film scene with a revolutionary, transgressive power the like of which had never been seen before in terms both of the themes he addressed and of his way of addressing them. In Spain, a country that had only recently thrown off the yoke of the Franco regime, he brought to the screen the ferments of Madrid’s legendary movida, opening up a space for a human magma that could finally sprout freely from the urban subsoil after decades of repression: homosexuals, transvestites, drug addicts, punks, masochistic housewives, sadistic singers, fetishist nuns, sex maniacs and countless other figures who, free at last, lived their passions to the limit – as did their negative antagonists, the rapist police officers, violent husbands or matadors thirsting for blood, the bearers of a destructive and lethal charge that was a product of the authoritarian past whose forces continued to act underground like an unresolved trauma. All the characters in this chaotic and exhilarating caravanserai chase after their obsessions as though under some hypnotic spell, the expression of their identity boiling down to mere desire. “Desire is something you can’t control, it answers to no law. For me, desire is the only possible lodestar, the only element that allows the characters to be free and to act according to their own nature, regardless of good or evil”, the director said, identifying desire as the narrative driving force behind his work and the raison d’être of his characters, especially his female characters, “always in search of something they haven’t got. Desire is spawned by that lack, by that void that they seek to fill with passion, even when that passion is clearly self-destructive”. Desire is the other side of the coin to that sense of emptiness, another key theme in his work from the outset. The void and death take up a growing amount of room in his films, eventually becoming central themes in the masterpieces of his mature period. Having exhausted the transgressive and grotesque elements of his early films, the clouds of loss embodied by numerous maternal figures, archetypes of pain and nostalgia, gather over his later work. Thus, the long creative curve of this great rebel master of the cinema takes us from the provocational and liberating energy reconquered after the dictatorship, to the lucid depiction of contemporary pain and existential disenchantment, offering us an alternative picture of European culture over the past forty years, where desire and the search for happiness and self-realisation end up being the a millstone around the neck of a humanity doomed to destroy itself.

 
Information
Admission free while places last, reservation recommended
Sala Cinema - Palazzo Esposizioni Roma
Admission via the steps in via Milano 9a, Rome
 
Reservations may be made on the italian version of this website from 9:00 am on the day before your chosen performance until two hours before the screening is due to begin.
Once you have made your reservation, please be sure to show up at least 10 minutes before the performance starts, otherwise your place will be given to the first person waiting in line at the entrance. If for any reason you are unable to come, please remember to cancel your reservation in your personal space on the website so that someone else can have your place.
If no more places are available on the website, you can still gain admission to the screenings even without a reservation. Simply show up before the start of the performance to see if any reservations have been cancelled or someone with a reservation has failed to turn up.