Pedro Almodóvar

Pedro Almodóvar was born in the 50s, in Calzada de Calatrava, province of Ciudad Real, in the heart of La Mancha. At eight years old, he moved to Extremadura with his family. He studied the last years of high school, with the Salesian and the Franciscan priests, respectively.

At 17, he moved to Madrid with no money and no job, but with a very specific project in mind: to study cinema and direct films.

Enrolling in the Official Film School was impossible because Franco had just closed it. Despite the dictatorship that was suffocating the country, Madrid represented culture, independence, and freedom for a rural adolescent.

He worked at many sporadic jobs, but he couldn’t buy his first Super-8mm camera until he got a “serious” job at the National Telephone Company of Spain in 1971. He worked there for twelve years as an administrative assistant, compensating this morning’s work with a variety of activities that were the real training as a filmmaker and as a person.

In the mornings, at the Telefónica Company, he gets to know the Spanish middle class more deeply at the beginning of the consumer era, the 70s, its dramas, and its miseries, a real vein for a future storyteller. In the evenings, he wrote, loved, and acted with the mythical independent theatre group Los Goliardos and made films in Super-8 (his only school). He also collaborated with various underground magazines and wrote stories, and he was a member of a parody punk-rock group, Almodóvar & McNamara, etc. He had the good fortune that his self-discovery coincided with the explosion of the democratic Madrid of the late seventies. That was the period the world knew as la Movida.

His films are like his children and his testimony of Spain's newborn democracy.

After a year and a half of eventful shooting on 16mm, in 1980, he opened his career with Pepi, Luci, Bom, a no-budget film made as a cooperative effort with the rest of the crew and the cast, all beginners, except for Carmen Maura.

In 1986, he founded the production company El Deseo with his brother Agustín. Their first project was Law of Desire. Since then, they have produced all the films that Pedro has written and directed, they have also produced other young directors.

Over the last 24 years, Almodóvar has received the most prestigious national and international film awards. And he continues with the same rhythm of work and passion as when he started.

Pedro Almodóvar posing in front of his work at the ‘Summer Vibes’ exhibition at Opera Gallery in Madrid, 31 July 2024. Photo Courtesy of Opera Gallery.