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Almodóvar returns to Cannes with his most personal and self-aware film
Pedro Almodóvar has returned to Cannes as one returns to a place where there are still accounts to settle. The Spanish director presented Amarga Navidad in the festival's official selection, his seventh participation in the main competition, surrounded by a large cast, red carpet and that mixture of French devotion and critical expectation that always accompanies his premieres on the Croisette.
The film arrives in France under the title Autofiction after opening in Spain in March. This is no minor detail: the film moves precisely through that territory between life, invention and self-portrait, with an Almodóvar who seems to look at his own work from within, dismantle it and rebuild it before the viewer.
Amarga Navidad stars Bárbara Lennie, Leonardo Sbaraglia, Aitana Sánchez-Gijón, Victoria Luengo, Patrick Criado, Milena Smit and Quim Gutiérrez. The story begins with grief, creative blocks and anxiety, but ends up entering a broader game about writing, doubles and the relationship between a creator and his creatures.
Cannes has a long relationship with Almodóvar. He competed there with All About My Mother, Volver, Broken Embraces, The Skin I Live In, Julieta and Pain and Glory. He won important awards, chaired the jury in 2017 and has always been received as one of Europe’s great auteurs, although the Palme d’Or remains the prize he has never achieved.
This time, moreover, his return forms part of a particularly strong moment for Spanish cinema. For the first time, Cannes 2026 has three Spanish films in official competition: Amarga Navidad, El ser querido, by Rodrigo Sorogoyen, and La bola negra, by Los Javis. It is an unusual presence that confirms the international weight auteur Spanish cinema has gained in recent years.
In France, the film’s arrival has been accompanied by special attention. Cahiers du Cinéma devoted its cover to Almodóvar, and the Centre Pompidou has scheduled a retrospective of his work, reinforcing the almost sentimental relationship between the filmmaker and the French public. For many critics, Amarga Navidad works as a particularly strange, ironic and obsessive piece within his filmography.
The Cannes premiere also comes after the Golden Lion at Venice which Almodóvar won with The Room Next Door, his first film shot in English. After that international phase, Amarga Navidad returns him to Spanish, to his regular actors and to a more intimate territory, where colour, artifice, melodrama and black humour once again mingle with a highly recognisable freedom.
At this point, each new Almodóvar film is no longer read merely as a release, but as another chapter in a long conversation between the director, his memory and Spanish cinema itself. Cannes once again offers him that amplified stage where his doubts, excesses and obsessions cease to be private matters and become a cultural event.