Pedro Almodóvar won his first ever top A-list festival prize on Saturday evening as his English-language euthanasia drama The Room Next Door , starring Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, scooped Venice’s Golden Lion.
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The Spanish director has competed six times in Competition at Cannes and is also a regular guest at Venice, even receiving its career award in 2019, but he had never previously won the top prize at either festival.
The filmmaker’s brother and producer Agustín Almodóvar was the first to point out the significance of Saturday night’s victory with a post on X, showing his sibling holding up the Golden Lion with the caption: “It’s taken 44 years.”
Quizzed about the victory and the time it has taken to win such an award, Almodóvar said he had never been obsessed with winning a Cannes Palme d’Or or Venice Golden Lion.
“It’s been 44 very fertile years in my life, both artistically and personally, and also as a Spanish citizen,” he said at the post-awards ceremony press conference.
“In these 44 years, we went from an atrocious dictatorship to the breadth of all the freedoms that were made available to us, which were accessible to all Spanish citizens in a matter of two or three years… My career has been quite linked, curiously, to the opening up to democracy in Spain. That in itself is something that must be celebrated,” he continued.
“Really explaining how one lives during Franco and how one lives in full democracy is such an extraordinary experience that there are no words for it.”
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Almodóvar said he had never given much thought to the possibility of winning the Golden Lion, even if his career has been intertwined with Venice since his early films.
He recalled an incident in 1983 when the Italian press waged a campaign for his film Dark Habits , about a group of riotously subversive nuns, to play in the festival after it emerged that then director Gian Luigi Rondi had blocked the film’s inclusion in the line-up because of its take on the Catholic Church.
“After that I continued making films,” he said.
Almodóvar said it would have been useful for his career to have received prizes earlier on as he struggled to make it as a director.
“Today, when I talk with the French press they say, ‘You should have a Palme d’Or’, but honestly, when I really needed awards, it was in ’80 and ’81 and ’82… with Pepi, Luci, Bom and Labyrinth of Passion … in those moments they would have saved my life,” he said.
Venice Winners: Pedro Almodóvar's 'The Room Next Door' Wins The Golden Lion; Also Wins For Nicole Kidman, Brady Corbet, 'I'm Still Here' & More
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