#UPDATED at 13h on 8 September.
Pedro Almodóvar’s ‘The Room Next Door’, the Spanish director’s first film in English, has won the Golden Lion, the top prize, at the Venice International Film Festival.
Although he has previously won two Oscars, this is the first time the 74-year-old Almodóvar has won the top award at one of the ‘big three’ European festivals: Venice, Cannes and Berlin.
‘I would like to dedicate it to my family,’ he said from the podium. ‘I’m not always so happy as I am now. This movie, The Room Next Door, is my first movie in English, but the spirit is Spanish.’
‘[Almodóvar] is a great among greats. What a huge pride for Spanish cinema,’ Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez posted on X (formerly Twitter).
Original report:
Spanish film director Pedro Almodóvar returned to the Venice Film Festival on Monday, in competition with his first feature film in English, ‘The Room Next Door’, starring Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton – and it received a 17-minute standing ovation after its premiere.
A meditation on death and friendship set in New England, the film sees regular Almodóvar collaborator Swinton as a war correspondent suffering from terminal cancer, with Moore as her friend, a successful novelist who agrees to be at her side in her final moments.
Actor John Turturro completes the leading trio in the film that translates into English what the director has been developing for more than a decade in his native language — an increasingly melancholy cinema prone to analysing the fear of death or physical decline.
‘My insecurity disappeared after the first table read with the actresses … The language wasn’t going to be a problem,’ Almodóvar said of his latest film, which had its world premiere on the Lido on Monday evening.
‘People talk a lot in my films … In The Room Next Door Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore carry the weight of the whole film on their shoulders, and they are a spectacle,’ he said.
It is not Almodóvar’s first foray into English-language filmmaking. His first, the short-format ‘The Human Voice’, premiered at Venice in 2020, featuring Swinton as an abandoned lover.
At Cannes last year, the director presented ‘Strange Way of Life’, another short-format film, this time a gay Western starring Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal.
An iconic voice in Spanish cinema, Almodóvar began with kitschy black comedies, such as ‘Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap’ or ‘What Have I Done to Deserve This’.
His breakout film was 1988’s ‘Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown’, which won the award for best screenplay at Venice and an Academy Award for best foreign language film.
But with time, the more circumspect streak of the prolific Spanish director has prevailed, developing from films such as 2002’s ‘Talk to Her’ — which won Almodóvar the Oscar for best original screenplay, a rare feat for a non-English film — and 2004’s ‘Bad Education’ to the more recent ‘Pain and Glory’ from 2019, about his career as a filmmaker.
‘Parallel Mothers’, the story of two women who give birth the same day, won a best actress award for Penelope Cruz at Venice in 2021.
Almodóvar’s film is one of 21 competing for the prestigious Golden Lion prize, to be awarded on 7 September.
According to Variety magazine, the applause for ‘The Room Next Door’ has so far eclipsed the other big standing ovations of the festival: Brady Corbet’s ‘The Brutalist’ (12 minutes), Pablo Larrain’s ‘Maria’ (eight minutes) starring Angelina Jolie as the famous opera singer Maria Callas – and Justin Kurzel’s ‘The Order’ (seven minutes), a 1980s crime thriller starring Jude Law.
ALSO READ: Pedro Almodóvar to receive 2024 San Sebastian Donostia Career Achievement Award.
El discurso completo de Pedro Almodóvar al recoger el León de Oro en #Venecia2024 por ‘La habitación de al lado’ pic.twitter.com/iIOs5Itx9v
— El cine en la SER (@ElCineEnLaSER) September 7, 2024
Pedro Almodóvar hugs Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore as their film #TheRoomNextDoor earns an unbelievable 17-minute ovation at Venice Film Festival. https://t.co/75AwZus3To pic.twitter.com/YrmHtJCSD5
— Variety (@Variety) September 2, 2024
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