Almodóvar competing for the Palme d’Or with “Broken Embraces”

The Cannes Festival Official Selection is glad to welcome Pedro Almodóvar to the Competition with Broken Embraces. After Volver (Best Screenplay, in 2006) and All About my Mother (Best Director, 1999), the filmmaking Spaniard is returning with a new homage to the seventh art.

"I feel it’s the first time I’ve made such an express declaration of love to cinema," Almodóvar says. "Not with a specific sequence, but with a whole film. To cinema, its materials, to the people who give all they’ve got around the spotlights, to the actors, editors, narrators, those who write, to the screens which show the images of intrigues and emotions. To films as they were made at the moment they were made. To something that, although you can make a living from it, is not only a profession but also an irrational passion."

Mateo Blanco’s tumultuous artistic life is the vessel for Almodóvar’s passion for cinema. The hero lives, loves, and writes in darkness. Fourteen years earlier, in a traumatic car crash on the island of Lanzarote, he lost not only his eyesight but also Lena, the woman he loved. In the present, circumstances conspire to stir up distant memories.