In 1999 Almodóvar had both critics and audiences swooning as he scooped best director at Cannes and the Oscar® for best foreign language film as he weaved together this magnificent tapestry of femininity to deliver a high-camp operetta and poignant story of love, loss and compassion.

When Manuela (Cecilia Roth), a single mother sees her only son tragically die on his 17th birthday, she decides to leave Madrid to rediscover old haunts in Barcelona and to find the boys dad - a transvestite named Lola - who remains unaware he is father to the child. Along the way she reconnects with an old friend, a pre-op transsexual prostitute named La Agrado (Antonia San Juan), through whom she meets Rosa (Penélope Cruz), a young nun who turns out to be pregnant. By happenstance she also becomes the personal assistant of Huma Rojo (Marisa Paredes), an actress greatly admired by her dead son, who is currently playing Blanche DuBois in a touring production of A Streetcar Named Desire. So sets up this remarkable story of one woman and her circle of friends who each find themselves suffering a variety of emotional crises.

A film consumed with roles and stages and with scripted lines that ring like the truth, Almodóvar’s interest in his female character’s ability to, in a word, perform, was rarely more evident. A deliberately revisionist take on Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s All About Eve (even the title is a riff) as well as invoking the theatrical tradition — specifically Tennessee Williams – don’t miss the chance to relive again this magnificent and moving classic of European filmmaking that had audiences leaving the cinema irradiated with bliss upon its original release.

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