Almodóvar Calls 'Bitter Christmas' His Riskiest Film
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- Pedro Almodóvar describes his 24th film 'Bitter Christmas' as 'the riskiest film I've ever made,' a nested film-within-a-film starring Barbara Lennie as director Elsa and Leonardo Sbaraglia as Raul, a character Almodovar says is his 'alter ego' with 80% of his dialogue being things the director himself could say.
- 'Bitter Christmas' adapts Almodóvar's own 2003 short story of the same name — published 20 years later in his collection 'The Last Dream' — and opens during a summer heatwave despite its festive title, a release-date oddity Almodóvar himself calls 'weird.'
- Almodóvar sneaks a jab at Netflix into the film — a character scoffs 'Don't reduce me to making a TV movie!' — echoing his 2017 Cannes jury-president stand against Netflix titles competing without a French theatrical release, a stance that put him at odds with juror Will Smith.
- Almodóvar revisits that Cannes clash and the 2022 Oscars slap — which he watched from the audience while nominated for 'Parallel Mothers' — saying Smith 'still sounds like he is in a cult' and calling his best-actor acceptance speech that year 'that of a cult leader.'
- Almodóvar pivots from cinema to geopolitics, urging the EU to be 'a shield for the crazy stuff Trump is coming up with in the US' and praising Spain's president for opposing US actions toward Ukraine and its alliance with Israel.
- Almodóvar reflects on adapting Alice Munro's stories into his 2016 film 'Julieta,' calling it 'overwhelming' that Munro wrote the story 'Silence' — about a daughter cutting off her mother — after staying married to her second husband despite his sexual abuse of her daughter, a revelation that emerged posthumously in 2024.
Why it matters: At 76, with 60-plus awards including two Oscars, Almodóvar is using Bitter Christmas to mount his most structurally daring and autobiographical project yet — a meta autofiction cautionary tale in which he casts himself as 'almost the villain' — while reigniting his long-running Netflix feud and inserting pointed Trump-era political commentary that positions European cinema as a cultural bulwark against US streaming dominance.
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