All About My Mother
Winner of the Foreign Language Film Oscar in 1999, Almodóvar's moving meditation on motherhood, All about My Mother accompanies nurse Manuela (Cecilia Roth) after she loses her teenage son in an accident and donates his heart. She travels to Barcelona to find his father, now a transgender woman. On her journey she reunites with Agrado (Antonia San Juan) a transgender sex worker and meets an HIV-positive nun (Penélope Cruz). Her journey brings her an unexpected family.

DIRECTOR: Pedro Almodóvar. WRITTEN BY: Pedro Almodóvar. CAST: Cecilia Roth, Marisa Paredes, Penélope Cruz, Candela Peña. 1999. 101 min. Spain/France. Color. Scope. Spanish. 35mm. Print courtesy of the Academy Film Archive.

Bad Education
This film within a film stars Gael García Bernal and Fele Martínez as two long-lost friends who share a disturbing past. Bad Education is a meditative exploration of memory and loss, while engaging with themes of transgressive sex, drug addiction, and the Catholic Church’s legacy of sexual abuse. Loaded with powerful imagery and a compelling use of meta-fiction, it’s a pleasure to get lost in its mysterious and labyrinthine plot.

DIRECTOR: Pedro Almodóvar. WRITTEN BY: Pedro Almodóvar. CAST: Gael García Bernal, Fele Martínez, Daniel Giménez Cacho, Lluís Homar. 2004. 106 min. Spain. Color. Scope. Spanish. 35mm.

Viewer discretion is strongly advised.

All film screenings in the Pedro Almodóvar series are available here. 

Academy Museum film programming generously funded by the Richard Roth Foundation.