Queering the Oscars: Best Foreign Film 1999, "All About My Mother"

For Pride Month, Team Experience has been looking at LGBTQ+ related Oscar nominations. We've decided to extend the series for a few more episodes. Pretend it's still June for a bit!

by Eric Blume

It’s wonderful fun to revisit 1999’s Best Foreign Language Film Oscar winner, director Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother.  Although it’s a beautifully textured, multi-layered tapestry of themes and emotions, it has to be one of the unusual films to ever win this big prize. The plot involves, among other thing: a nurse going onstage as an unrehearsed cover for Stella in A Streetcar Named Desire; a HIV-positive, pregnant nun; two heterosexual women united by giving birth to sons named Esteban from the same transgender woman; and numerous conversations and jokes about acquired tits.

That none of these unlikely and uncommercial plot strands feel forced or shocking is due to the artistry of Almodóvar. The Spanish auteur weaves stories together nobody else would think of in a million years, wrapped up in the boldest color palettes imaginable, with performances of sheer emotional force that rattle the roof...

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'The Beasts' wins big at the Goyas

by Nathaniel R

THE BEASTS © Greenwich Entertainment

Spain's annual Goya Awards, now in their 37th year,  were held this weekend in Seville. Rodrigo Soroyen's thriller The Beasts, about a middle aged French couple who move to rural Spain and are greeted with surprising hostility by neighbors won big. It took nine prizes from its 17 nominations. (Greenwich Entertainment has distribution rights in the US but no word yet on when it's coming out.) If the name Rodrigo Soroyen sounds familiar to you, that's because he was an Oscar nominee not too long ago with the live-action short Madres (2018)...

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Review: "Piggy" is a visceral nightmare

by Cláudio Alves

© Magnet Releasing

Somewhere in the Spanish countryside, in a small town of Extremadura, Sara lives the kind of earthly hell familiar to many of those who grew up as fat teens. Judgment comes from every direction, shame inflicted upon her until it curdles the spirit. It's not just strangers that hurt, for a casual remark from one's mother can be so lacerating it leaves a scar. Still, there's nothing worse for Sara than her peers, cruel kids who couch their hatred in vacuous assertions that they mean well, that it's for her own good. A trip to the pool for Sara becomes another opportunity for torment at the hands of mean girls, including former friends.

Nearly drowned, her clothes stolen, a humiliated Sara walks home half-naked under the summer sun. It's then that a mysterious van appears, looming ominous in her path. Inside, the girl's tormentors lay powerless, victimizers turned victims at the hands of a kidnapper cum killer. Sara sees it all, the man in charge sees her, and they both do nothing – the van drives away…

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NYFF: The elegiac 'Alcarràs' mourns the moment at hand

by Jason Adams

I never got to see my grandfather’s farm. The land was sold off and the barns and the stables were all torn down before I was born, all so a series of electricity transmission towers could be built across the middle of it. When I was a little kid my father and I would visit my grandparents small home perched astride where the farm used to be and my father would walk me out and point up at the towers in a field out behind their house, telling me how those towers stretched across the entire state. He always seemed proud, strangely in awe of them, as if those were our inheritance somehow. And I couldn’t stop thinking about those towers while watching Carla Simón’s melancholy and moving Alcarràs at NYFF this week. 

This film, about peach farmers on the other side of the globe spending one last summer on the precipice of losing their home, land, and farm, seemed to be offering genuine insight into my own family and history...

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Spain announces its three Oscar finalists. Plus: Spain's Oscar history

by Nathaniel R

Earlier today in Spain, the actress Maria Pedraza Morillo (Money Heist, Elite) had the privilege of announcing the three films that will compete to become Spain's Oscar submission for 2022. These three films were selected from a pool of 43 films (we have not been able to find the longlist) and now they will be narrowed down to one by September 13th as the members of Spain's Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sciences vote. Which of the following three do you think it will be? 

Details on their choices after the jump...

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