All About My Mother

Manuela is a nurse in Madrid who lives for her teenage son Esteban, a boy who wants to be a writer. On his seventeenth birthday she takes him to see A Streetcar Named Desire. After the show, running in the rain to get an autograph from the lead actress, he is hit by a car. Shattered, Manuela goes to Barcelona to find Esteban's father, who never knew he had a son. In Barcelona she meets a whole family of women: an old friend, a young nun, the actress herself, and they begin to hold each other up.

Pedro Almodóvar dedicated the film to actresses, to mothers, and to all the women who have played them, and it is one of his most generous works. Cecilia Roth is magnificent as Manuela, and there are wonderful performances from Marisa Paredes, a young Penélope Cruz, and Antonia San Juan as Agrado, whose monologue about her body and authenticity is one of the most famous scenes in Spanish cinema.

The film is melodrama, the kind Almodóvar loves from old Hollywood, full of coincidences, theatre and big emotions. But it is also deeply serious about grief, about AIDS, about chosen families and the dignity of people society ignores. It won the Oscar and Best Director at Cannes. Warm, tragic, funny and full of love. A masterpiece.