Competition: "Volver" by Pedro Almodovar

The third day of this 59th edition of the Festival de Cannes is marked by the return to the Official Selection - seven years after All About My Mother which won the Prize to the Best Director, and two years after Bad Education - of Pedro Almod¢var presenting in competition Volver. In this film, the Spanish director looks back to his roots and draws the portrait of three generations of women confronted by madness, lies, superstition and even death. There is Raimunda (Penélope Cruz), married to a man out of work, and her fourteen-year-old daughter; Sole (Lola Dueñas), her sister who manages a hairdressing salon at home; and their mother (Carmen Maura) who died a few years earlier in a fire. The latter reappears one day and seems to have scores to settle with her daughters...

Pedro Almod¢var on the theme of his new film: "I have the impression, and I hope that it isn't just a temporary one, that I managed to fit in a missing piece (whose absence, throughout my life, has brought me great suffering and anxiety, I would even say that over recent years it has poisoned my existence, by outrageously over-dramatising it). This element of which I speak is 'death', not only mine and that of the beings that I love, but the inevitable disappearance of all which is alive. I was never able to accept or understand it. And it provokes a state of anxiety before the ever faster flight of time."