All About My Mother
Short description
Manuela, a single mother in Madrid who works in an organ transplant unit, raises her teenage son Esteban on her own. The boy longs to know about the father he has never met, and he shares with his mother a devotion to the actress Huma Rojo. After Esteban dies in a road accident, Manuela leaves Madrid for Barcelona to find the father, a transgender woman now called Lola, who never learned she had a son. Once there, she renews her friendship with Agrado, a transgender sex worker she had known years earlier, and through her meets Rosa, a young nun who is pregnant and HIV-positive. Manuela also becomes close to Huma Rojo, the actress her son admired, and to Nina, Huma's troubled colleague.
Pedro Almodóvar wrote and directed the film, the ninth of the 22 features he has directed in chronological order, coming between Live Flesh and Talk to Her. Cecilia Roth leads the cast as Manuela, with Marisa Paredes as Huma Rojo, Candela Peña as Nina, Antonia San Juan as Agrado, Penélope Cruz as Rosa and Rosa María Sardà as Rosa's mother, among 26 credited actors. Made for about 5 million dollars, it took roughly 68 million dollars worldwide. It holds a 7.8 rating on IMDb from 109,000 votes and a 7.6 on TMDB from 2,112 votes, while its critics' rating stands at 8.7 from 99 reviews, well above the audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- Radost's monologue is based on a real event. When the electronic system of the Teatro Argentino failed, the director cancelled the performance. Actress Lola Membrives decided to inform the audience in the hall and made them an offer: if they stayed, she would tell them the story of her life.
- Manuela Coleman is a character in Pedro Almodóvar's film 'The Flower of My Secret'.
- ’All About My Mother’ is the first film by Pedro Almodóvar largely shot outside of Madrid. The director pays tribute to Spain’s second largest city – Barcelona.
- Pedro Almodóvar dedicated his film ‘…to all the actors who act; all the women who act; all the men who act and transform into women; and to all those who want to be a mother and their mother’.
- In his notes on the film, Pedro Almodóvar recalls Blanche Dubois’s line (“A Streetcar Named Desire” by Williams) “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers” and notes that in the film, the strangers are women.
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