Director: Pedro Almodóvar
Language: Spanish w/English subtitles

Starring: Antonia San Juan, Cecilia Roth, Marisa Paredes, Penélope Cruz

This Oscar-winning melodrama provides a dizzying, moving exploration of the meaning of motherhood. In an instant, nurse Manuela (Roth) loses the teenage son she raised on her own. Grief-stricken, she sets out to search for the boy’s long-lost father in Barcelona, where she becomes immersed in the lives of a wild, chosen family.

Considered Pedro Almodóvar's breakthrough into the international sphere, winning him the Academy Award and Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film, All About My Mother takes place in a world where mothers are given second chances through the patience and grace of other women. Lovingly obvious references to Opening Night, All About Eve and A Streetcar Named Desire form a freewheeling narrative. Filled with regret over the secrets she never told her son before his death, actress-turned-nurse Manuela (Cecilia Roth) leaves Madrid and returns to her old stomping grounds in Barcelona in search of the boy's father. Instead of the immediate closure she wanted, Manuela finds herself in odd community with women whose lives revolve around performance: the actress Huma (Marisa Paredes), the precocious church girl Rosa (Penélope Cruz), the trans sex worker Agrado (Antonia San Juan), each wrestling with what it means to be a modern woman as Spain moves further away from the Franco regime. Through these sumptuously crafted cross-generational connections, Almodóvar denaturalizes motherhood into something that can be as fleetingly intuitive as a great performance on opening night or as unnatural as a strange haircut mistaken for a wig.