a film festival withPEDRO ALMODOVAR

“I WAS BORN AT A BAD TIME

FOR SPAIN, BUT A REALLY GOOD ONE FOR

CINEMA”

“I WAS BORN AT A BAD TIME

FOR SPAIN, BUT A REALLY GOOD ONE FOR

CINEMA”

ALMODÓVAR

BIOGRAPHY OF

4 / Exquisite Contradiction

ALMODÓVAR On his seventeenth birthday, Esteban is hit by a

car and killed while chasing after actress Huma Rojo for her autograph following a performance of A Streetcar Named Desire, in which she portrays Blanche DuBois.

Pedro Almodóvar Caballero was born in Calzada de Calatrava, Spain, a rural small town of Ciudad Real, a province of Castile-La Mancha in the ad-ministrative district of Almagro. He was born as one of four children in a large and impoverished family of peasant stock. His father, Antonio Alm-odóvar, who could barely read or write, worked most of his life hauling barrels of wine by mule. Almodóvar’s mother, Francisca Caballero, turned her son into a part-time teacher of literacy in the village and also a letter reader and transcriber for the neighbors. When Pedro was eight years old, the family sent him to study at a religious boarding school in the city of Cáceres, Extremad-ura, in the west of the country, with the hope that he might someday become a priest. His family eventually joined him in Cáceres, where his fa-ther opened a gas station and his mother opened a bodega where she sold her own wine.

FILMOGRAPHY

1980 / Pepi, Luci, Bom

1982 / Labyrinth of Passion

1983 / Dark Habits

1984 / What Have I Done to Deserve This?

1986 / Matador

1987 / Law of Desire

1988 / Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

1990 / Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!

1991 / High Heels

1993 / Kika

1995 / The Flower of My Secret

1997 / Live Flesh

1999 / All About My Mother

2002 / Talk to Her

2004 / Bad Education

2006 / Volver

2009 / Broken Embraces

2011 / The Skin I Live In

2013 / I’m So Excited

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THE FILMS

8 / Exquisite Contradiction

FILMSOn his seventeenth birthday, Esteban is hit by a car and killed while chasing after actress Huma Rojo for her autograph following a performance of A Streetcar Named Desire, in which she portrays Blanche DuBois.

ALL ABOUT MY MOTHERThe film centers on Manuela, a nurse who over-sees donor organ transplants in Ramón y Cajal Hospital in Madrid and single mother to Esteban, a teenager who wants to be a writer.

On his seventeenth birthday, Esteban is hit by a car and killed while chasing after actress Huma Rojo for her autograph following a performance of A Streetcar Named Desire, in which she portrays Blanche DuBois. Manuela has to agree with her colleagues at work that her son’s heart be transplanted to a man in A Coruña. After traveling after her son’s heart, Manuela quits her job and journeys to Barcelona, where she hopes to find her son’s father, Lola, a transvestite she kept secret from her son, just as she never told Lola they had a son.

In Barcelona, Manuela reunites with her old friend Agrado, a warm and witty transsexual prostitute. She also meets and becomes deeply involved with several characters: Rosa, a young nun who works in a shelter for battered prostitutes and is pregnant by Lola; Huma Rojo, the actress her son had admired; and the drug-addicted Nina Cruz, Huma’s co-star and lover. Her life be-comes entwined with theirs as she cares for Rosa during her pregnancy and works for Huma as her personal assistant and even acts in the play as an understudy for Nina during one of her drug abuse crises.

“THE CHARACTERS IN MY FILMS ARE ASSASSINS, RAPISTS AND SO ON, BUT I DON’T TREAT THEM AS CRIMINALS, I TALK ABOUT THEIR HUMANITY.”

12 / Exquisite Contradiction

TALK TO HERMarco is a journalist and travel writer who hap-pens to see a TV interview of Lydia González, a famous matador. He thinks up that an article over the female matador would be interesting and on the instructions of his editor, he contacts her in a bar where she asks him to take her to her house. As they talk she elaborates on the fact that she broke up with her boyfriend “El Niño de Rivera”, another matador, something that has been all over the tabloids; as Marco confesses that he knows nothing of bullfighting and that he is a journalist, she becomes angry and leaves his car without saying a word. As he drives off, he hears a scream inside her house and stops, Lydia rushes off and climbs back into his car, she asks him to kill a snake that she found in her house, he does so and comes out of the house crying. With that new confidence established between them they become friends and later on lovers. Marco attends a wedding in Toledo and is surprised to find Lydia there too, since she had said that she did not want

to go. The wedding turns out to be of Marco’s former fiancé who had the same phobia to snakes as Lydia, Marco was very much in love with her and had a very hard time getting over her (which was the reason of his constant crying over things he could not share with her), Lydia says that she has something important to say but she prefers to wait until after the bull-fight that afternoon but she is gored and becomes comatose. Marco does not leave her side at the hospital and finally befriends Benigno, who recognized him from the dance recital. Marco is told by the doctors that people in coma never wake up but that there are miracle-stories of people who have come back but that he should not keep his hopes high.

“VERY FEW FILMMAKERS HAVE MANAGED TO

SMILE SO CONVINCINGLY IN THE FACE OF MISERY

AND FATALITY”

“VERY FEW FILMMAKERS HAVE MANAGED TO

SMILE SO CONVINCINGLY IN THE FACE OF MISERY

AND FATALITY”

VOLVERRaimunda (Penélope Cruz) and Soledad (Lola Dueñas) are sisters who grew up in Alcanfor de las Infantas, a small village in La Mancha, but now both live in Madrid. Their parents died in a tragic fire three years prior to the beginning of the film. The events which occurred on the night of the fire are only gradually revealed, but are central to the plot.

Sole returns to the village for the funeral of her elderly Aunt Paula (Chus Lampreave). Aunt Paula’s neighbour Agustina (Blanca Portillo) con-fesses to Sole that she has heard Paula talking to the ghost of Sole’s mother Irene (Carmen Maura). Sole encounters the ghost herself, and when she returns to Madrid, she discovers that the ghost has stowed away in the trunk of her car. Irene has brought luggage, intending to stay with her daughter for a while, and Sole, though fright-ened, agrees to let her mother stay with her: Sole operates a hair salon in her apartment, and Irene will assist her, posing as a Russian woman to hide

her true identity. Sole tries to determine why her mother’s ghost has returned to Earth, asking her if she left anything undone in her life. Irene says that she does have issues to resolve, relating to the questions of why Raimunda hates her and why she is afraid to reveal herself to Raimunda.

Meanwhile Raimunda and her daughter Paula (Yohana Cobo) have a different death to cope with. Paula’s father Paco (Antonio de la Torre) attempts to rape her, claiming that he is not really her father, and Paula stabs him in self-defense. Raimunda quickly hides the corpse in the deep-freezer of a nearby unused restaurant. The owner of the restaurant building, Emilio (Carlos Blanco), is out of town and entrusted Raimunda with the keys so that she can show it to pro-spective tenants. When members of a film crew happen upon the restaurant, Raimunda strikes a deal to cater for them, and suddenly finds herself back in the restaurant business.

16 / Exquisite Contradiction

CREDITS18 / Exquisite Contradiction

IMAGE SOURCEGoogle Images

CONTENTWikipedia

TYPEFACEBodoni

CLASSType 2

INSTRUCTORJenny Pan

This project involved developing an identity for a San Francisco event, for which I chose a fictional Pedro Almodovar film festival. The brief was to create promotional materials which include a poster, flyer or brochure, cd or dvd cover, name tags, volunteer form and a 16 page book.

The design was limited to one typeface with limited used of photos and colors.

Almodovars films are always full of drama and comedy yet the two never seem to conflict. With that idea, I created the concept of the Exquisite Contradictions, juxtaposing classic iconography to create visual elements that relate to his films. Adding a touch of Spanish sensibility the visual system is a modern and fun take on Almodovar’s traditional styles.

All images and content used for this project was collected from the web. Designs and illustrations were created by me.

CREDITS

a film festival of Pedro Almodovar

a film festival of Pedro Almodovar

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TRAD

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