Film: Pain and Glory in the Irish Film Institute (Captioned Screenings)

A film director reflects on the choices he’s made in life as past and present come crashing down around him.

Pedro Almodóvar’s elegiac drama boasts a career-best performance from Antonio Banderas as Salvador Mallo, a creatively blocked film director consumed by memories of an impoverished yet idyllic childhood spent with his mother Jacinta (played by Penélope Cruz).

Salvador is a thinly-veiled portrait of Almodóvar, and ‘Pain and Glory’ is a transparently self-reflexive film which finds the director dwelling upon themes that have resonated throughout his work: motherhood, childhood sexual awakening, loves lost and found, and his life-long love affair with Madrid.

Salvador is prompted to reconnect with the estranged star of one of his lauded early films, which has been restored for an anniversary screening, a meeting which proves to be the catalyst for a series of interconnected reveries into his past.

OC screenings: Monday 26th (13.00) and Wednesday 28th (20.50)
See www.ifi.ie for details of Audio Described screenings