Running Date: 21 Jan - 11 Mar 2026

Pedro Almodóvar (1949--) is Spain’s best-known film director. Before becoming famous in 1989 with Academy-Award nominated Women on the Verge of A Nervous Breakdown, he was celebrated as a radically innovative director who focused on an optimistic present rather than on Spain’s dark past. One of the most prominent members of the avant-garde movement known as la movida, he became the poster boy for supposedly apolitical art in newly democratic Spain. Numerous box office and critical successes including All About My Mother (1999), Volver (2006) and Pain and Glory (2020) have consolidated his reputation as a visually exuberant and technically excellent director who places stories at the heart of his films.

This course celebrates this most important and influential contemporary Spanish filmmaker showing how, despite his reputation for beautiful films and whimsical stories, Almodóvar also addresses Spain’s Civil War and dictatorship. We will be looking at four of Almodóvar’s films from the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s to explore how his cinema moves from a desire to pretend that Franco never existed to a recognition that its impacts and ghosts never went away.

This course, consisting of four films and four lectures will delivered by Dr Ana María Sánchez-Arce (Associate Professor, Sheffield Hallam University).