“This January, The Loft celebrates wildly-subversive Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar, whose bold, colorful and riotously funny films almost single-handedly put Spanish cinema on the world map in the 1980s and ‘90s.
“Cinema can fill in the empty spaces of your life and your loneliness.” – Pedro Almodóvar
Mixing together drag queens, nymphomaniacs, drug-addicted nuns, homicidal bullfighters, pornographers, punk rockers and more, Almodóvar gleefully concocted a delirious carnival of style, politics and unhinged sexuality unlike anyone before him in comedies like What Have I Done to Deserve This? and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Born in 1951 in La Mancha, the young Almodóvar gorged himself on a non-stop diet of florid Hollywood melodramas and Catholic school teachings – both of which would become major influences on his career as a filmmaker. Moving to Madrid in the early ‘70s, he worked as a telephone operator before gaining a growing reputation in the Madrid underground for his scandalously funny comic books and short stories, as well as his infamous Super-8mm shorts with titles like Two Whores and The Fall of Sodom. Playfully destroying stereotypical gender roles and conventional notions of good taste, Almodóvar’s early feature films, with their wild comedy and shocking excess, introduced the world to his singular sensibility, and a decades-long love affair between director and audience was born. With his more recent films, including the Oscar-winning dramas All About My Mother and Talk to Her, Flower of My Secret and Volver, Almodóvar (long one of cinema’s greatest champions of complex female characters) has combined the perverse brilliance of his earlier years with a profound, often heartbreaking understanding of the depth of human emotions. The Loft Cinema proudly pays tribute to the one-and-only Pedro Almodóvar with a selection of some of his best and most defining films. “
Jan. 6 All About my Mother
Jan. 13 Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!
Jan. 20 Talk to Her
Jan. 27 Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
All films will be showing at 7 p.m,. at the Loft Cinema, 3233 E. Speedway Blvd. in Tucson. Regular admission prices.
