Official Competition: Which other films shared the poster with Penelope Cruz and Antonio Banderas?

The official competition, directed by Mariano Connie and Gaston Duprat, introduces a billionaire businessman who decides to make a film to leave his mark on history.

Then he hired the best: the famous film director Lola Cuevas, the Hollywood star Felix Rivero and the radical theater actor Ivan Torres. But if their talent is great … their ego is even bigger!

This superstar, played by Antonio Banderas, turns out to be based on the unusual methods of this eccentric director camped by Penelope Cruz.

But did you know that the two actors have already met twice on the set?

Passenger lovers

In 2013, legendary Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodვარvar assembled this cult duo of Les Amants in transit.

This delicious comedy brings together colorful characters who think they are spending the last hours on a plane bound for Mexico City.

A technical malfunction (a kind of justified negligence, even if it is contradictory; but, after all, it is human actions) endangers the lives of passengers on 2549 flights on the peninsula.

The pilots work with the control tower staff to find a solution. The head of the cabin and the stewards are atypical and baroque characters who are in danger, trying to forget their own troubles and giving themselves soul and spirit to make the journey as enjoyable as possible for the passengers while waiting for the solution. Problem found.

Living in the clouds is as difficult as living on land, for the same reasons that can be summed up in two words: “sex” and “death”.

Business class travelers are: a newlywed couple from the city who went to a wedding; A fraudulent, unscrupulous financier who mourns the abandonment of his daughter; Don Juan with a bad conscience trying to say goodbye to one of his mistresses; Provincial clairvoyant; The queen of the heart press and a Mexican who has a great secret.

Each has a job or a plan to escape to Mexico. They all have a secret and not just the Mexican. Vulnerability to danger poses a general catharsis between both passengers and crew.

This catharsis becomes the best way to escape from the idea of ​​death. Against the backdrop of unbridled and moral comedy, all of these characters spend time with sensational recognition that helps them forget the suffering of that moment.

Pain and glory

After The Passenger Lovers, Pedro Almodოვvar returns to the charge in 2019 of the pain and glory of Antonio and Penelope.

If they share a poster of this feature film, the two stars will not respond. Banderas slides in the costume of a descending filmmaker, the victim of his melancholy neuroses. As for Penelope, she portrays the director’s mother in flashbacks.

The work tells the story of a series of meetings several decades later, some with flesh and blood, some with memory, in the life of a painfully director.

First Love, Next, Mom, Death, the actors she worked with, the 60s, the 80s, and the present.

Inability to separate creativity and personal life. And emptiness, an unrecognized emptiness in the face of the impossibility of continuing to rotate.

Antonio Banderas won the Best Actor Award at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival for his performance. His performance also won an Oscar nomination for Best Actor in a Leading Role in 2020.

Pain and Glory completes a trilogy composed of desire and poor education. If Pedro Almodდოvar did not originally intend to create this trilogy, it turns out that these three feature films have a protagonist and are a desire and a cinematic fiction.

“Fiction is intertwined with reality from film to film. Fiction and real life are two sides of the same coin, and in real life there is always pain and desire.”Said the director.

Note that the apartment of Antonio Banderas’s character, from the scenery to the furniture, is a reproduction of Pedro Almodვარvar. The assistant artist sometimes even went directly to the director of the subjects for the needs of the stage.

Director of Photography Jose Luis Alcain also went there to observe the light several times a day and multiply it in the studio.

In turn, the actress has hair like a filmmaker, except that she is wearing clothes. However, he did not try to imitate his model, although this allowed him to do so: “It was true: I was not his character, but he was in me”she said.