Amarga Navidad

The new film by Spanish master Pedro Almodóvar revolves around Elsa (Bárbara Lennie), an advertising director who loses her mother. She tries to suppress her grief by throwing herself completely into her work, until migraines force her to stop working. She leaves for Lanzarote with her friend Patricia, while her boyfriend Bonifacio stays behind in Madrid. In parallel, we follow filmmaker Raúl (Leonardo Sbaraglia), a screenwriter who puts Elsa's story on paper on a meta-level. In doing so, the film plays with the idea of autofiction, a mix of autobiography and fiction, and explores how life and art bleed into one another. Stories slide into each other and characters sometimes turn out to be different than they seem. Amarga Navidad is an intimate personal Spanish tragicomedy, written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar, the acclaimed filmmaker behind titles such as Madres paralelas, Dolor y Gloria and The Room Next Door. A film about grief, creative stagnation and the question of who actually has the right to tell a story.