• Pedro Almodóvar declared “Europe must never be subjected to Trump” at his Cannes press conference, drawing loud applause from international press
• The director wore a “Free Palestine” pin and called speaking out a “moral duty” for all artists
• His comments came amid a growing controversy over Canal+ CEO Maxime Saada threatening to blacklist artists who signed an anti-Bolloré petition
• Over 600 industry figures, including Juliette Binoche, signed the petition warning of a “fascist takeover” of French film
• Almodóvar’s new film Bitter Christmas received a standing ovation at its Cannes world premiere

Pedro Almodóvar didn’t come to Cannes to stay quiet. At Wednesday’s press conference for his new film Bitter Christmas, the Oscar-winning Spanish director brought a room full of international journalists to their feet with a declaration that’s already echoing well beyond the Croisette: “Europe must never be subjected to Trump!”

The applause was immediate and thunderous.

Almodóvar was responding to a question about two converging crises — the political climate in the U.S. under Trump, and a very French controversy involving Canal+, the country’s premier pay-TV channel. He was wearing a “Free Palestine” pin as he spoke.

“I don’t want to judge anyone, but I think artists have to speak out about the situation in which they live in contemporary society. It’s a moral duty,” he said. “Silence and fear is a symptom that things are going badly. It’s a serious sign democracy is crumbling. On the contrary, creators must speak out… the worst thing that could happen would be to remain silent or to be censored. We have a moral obligation to speak out.”

He went further, urging fellow artists to “act as a shield against this madness” — and specifically named Netanyahu alongside Trump as targets of that resistance. “We need to turn against Netanyahu. In Europe, we have laws, there are certain limits.”

The Canal+ Controversy Fueling the Fire

The Canal+ situation has been a slow-burning crisis that finally ignited at this year’s festival. On opening day, May 12, more than 600 members of the French film industry — including Juliette Binoche, Adèle Haenel, Cannes contenders Arthur Harari and Bertrand Mandico, and Anatomy of a Fall actor Swann Arlaud — signed an open letter published in the newspaper Libération. The letter warned that right-wing media mogul Vincent Bolloré’s growing stranglehold over French entertainment — he owns Canal+, its production arm Studiocanal, and is now in the process of acquiring UGC, France’s third-largest cinema chain — risked becoming a “fascist takeover of the collective imagination.”

The response from Canal+ was swift and chilling. CEO Maxime Saada announced at a Cannes producers’ brunch that the network would essentially refuse to work with anyone who’d signed the petition. “I don’t want to work with people who call us crypto-fascists,” Saada said. It’s the kind of statement that turns an industry dispute into something that feels much larger — and it’s why audiences at this year’s Cannes have been booing the Canal+ logo before screenings, every single day.

The parallel to what’s happening in the U.S. is hard to miss. Bolloré’s consolidation of French film — from production to distribution to exhibition — mirrors the kind of media concentration playing out stateside with David Ellison’s Paramount-Skydance deal and the ongoing Warner Bros. Discovery situation. One crisis on each side of the Atlantic, the same underlying anxiety about who gets to control the stories we tell.

Almodóvar Has Been Saying This for a While

Wednesday’s press conference wasn’t a sudden breaking point for Almodóvar — it was the latest in a string of increasingly direct statements. Ahead of the festival, he told the Los Angeles Times that he was struck by how muted this year’s Oscars felt politically. “It was quite notable watching the Oscar telecast where there were not many protests against the war or against Trump,” he said. “The only real example I can remember came from a European, a friend of mine, Javier Bardem, who did directly say, ‘Free Palestine.'”

“People are obviously very frightened,” he continued. “The U.S. is not a democracy right now. Some people say it’s maybe an imperfect democracy, but I really don’t think the U.S. is a democracy right now. The heartbreaking and ironic thing is that democracy has given rise, through the proper, right voting mechanism, to this kind of totalitarian regime. And it’s both a paradox and it’s also incredibly sad.”

When the LA Times asked whether he worries that speaking out could hurt his career, his answer was immediate: “Not at all.” He credited both his nationality and his position outside Hollywood for giving him the freedom to be direct. “In a generalized Spanish sense, here we’re not afraid to call things for what they are,” he said. “It’s easier for me to be clear” because he works outside the American industry’s orbit.

He’s been consistent. Back in 2025, while accepting the Chaplin Award at Lincoln Center in New York, he described America as “ruled by a narcissistic authority, who doesn’t respect human rights” — and later said Trump would be remembered as a “catastrophe.”

A New Film, and a New Direction

Bitter Christmas, which received a standing ovation — reports clocked it at somewhere between six and seven minutes — at its world premiere Tuesday night, is Almodóvar’s eighth film in competition at Cannes. It tells two parallel stories: one following a successful writer-director named Raúl Rossetti (Leonardo Sbaraglia) who’s hit a wall creatively, and another set 22 years earlier involving a filmmaker named Elsa (Bárbara Lennie), who’s abandoned features for advertising after a string of flops. The two timelines may or may not be connected.

For Almodóvar, it’s also something of a turning point. “I want to discover a universe that’s different from my own. I would like to change direction and paths,” he said at the press conference. “This is the last film about myself.”

He’s won at Cannes before — best director for All About My Mother in 1999, best screenplay for Volver in 2006. Whether Bitter Christmas adds to that tally remains to be seen. But right now, it’s his voice off-screen that has the festival talking.

The post Almodóvar: ‘Europe Must Never Be Subjected to Trump’ appeared first on Cream.

• Pedro Almodóvar received a 6.5-minute standing ovation at the Cannes international premiere of Bitter Christmas
• The film is Almodóvar’s eighth in competition at Cannes — a festival record — but the Palme d’Or has still eluded him
• A simultaneous press screening in the Bazin theater was evacuated after an elderly attendee collapsed about 15 minutes in
• Critics are divided: some call it a fascinating act of self-interrogation, others find it emotionally remote despite its craft
• Almodóvar told Deadline he spent four years writing the script and hinted he may make another English-language film

Pedro Almodóvar brought the Cannes crowd to its feet Tuesday night. The Spanish auteur’s Bitter Christmas earned a 6.5-minute standing ovation at its international premiere in the Grand Théâtre Lumière, with the director attending alongside leads Bárbara Lennie and Leonardo Sbaraglia and the full ensemble cast. It wasn’t the 17-minute marathon that greeted The Room Next Door at Venice — but the Cannes crowd made their affection clear, cheering Almodóvar all the way out of the theater after he addressed them directly.

“I always enjoy the warm reception Cannes gives me from the moment I enter the cinema,” Almodóvar told the audience, adding that he would miss it when he could no longer attend. That drew another fresh wave of applause.

It’s his eighth film in competition here — a festival record — cementing a relationship with Cannes that stretches back decades. He won best director for All About My Mother in 1999, best screenplay for Volver in 2006, and Antonio Banderas took best actor for Pain and Glory in 2019. The Palme d’Or, somehow, has never come.

What ‘Bitter Christmas’ Is Actually About

Bitter Christmas — which opened in Spain in March to positive reviews before making its Croisette debut — is, in the simplest terms, a Russian nesting doll of a movie. It begins in 2004, following Elsa (Lennie), a cult filmmaker turned advertising director plagued by migraines and panic attacks, who travels to the volcanic island of Lanzarote with her friend Patricia (Victoria Luengo) after the death of her mother. Her devoted younger boyfriend Bonifacio, played by Patrick Criado, is a firefighter who moonlights as a stripper — and yes, we get the full routine, set to Grace Jones.

Then the film pulls back to reveal that Elsa’s entire story is a screenplay being written by Raúl Rossetti (Sbaraglia), an esteemed auteur in 2026 who carries Almodóvar’s bearing and silvery hairdo, and who has been creatively running on fumes. Raúl lives in an airy villa beside a Hockney-esque swimming pool, supported by his younger partner Santi (Quim Gutiérrez) and his indispensable assistant Mónica (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón). As the film progresses, the boundary between Raúl’s fiction and his reality begins to dissolve — and by the end, it becomes clear that Raúl is Almodóvar’s own alter ego, with Elsa functioning as an alter ego once removed.

The ensemble also includes Milena Smit as Natalia, a young mother undone by grief, and a characteristically scene-stealing cameo from Rossy de Palma as the madrileña social butterfly Gabriela — “like an Auntie Mame,” as one reviewer put it — who pauses a fabulous party long enough to give Elsa her stash of heavy-duty painkillers. The movie takes its title from a Chavela Vargas ranchera, and the late Mexican singer’s music appears twice, including a raspy late-career performance of “La Llorona” that several critics singled out as the film’s most ravishing sequence.

The Scene Everyone’s Talking About

The film’s emotional climax arrives in a pair of ferocious confrontations between Raúl and Mónica, after she reads his script and returns furious — both at his use of a friend’s suicide attempt as dramatic material, and at his broader obliviousness to the people around him. In one moment that got a laugh at the Cannes screening, she suggests he cut the problematic section entirely, call it a minor work, and sell it to Netflix. “I ask for your advice,” Raúl shoots back, “and you tell me to make a TV movie!”

Sánchez-Gijón is being singled out for her work in these scenes — fierce, unsparing, and clearly speaking for the director himself. Almodóvar confirmed as much in an interview with Deadline. “Monica’s character is a reflection of the ways in which I may question myself,” he said. “As Monica is challenging him, yes, she’s challenging me as a director. And I found the experience of displaying that both liberating and amusing because it did become a process of criticizing myself.”

He was equally candid about the ethics of autofiction — the film’s central preoccupation. “Sometimes a writer doesn’t think of the way precisely that they’re going to hurt the people around them, because at the end of the day, they don’t think about the hurt, they think about the idea, and that becomes a dangerous thing,” he said. “And so at a certain level, my screenwriter is kind of also the villain in the film.”

The script itself, he revealed, has been brewing for about four years — adapted from a short story he wrote years earlier that originally just followed Elsa, her firefighter boyfriend, and their trip to Lanzarote. The character of Mónica, who ends up driving the entire third act, wasn’t part of the original at all. “She was not part of the story previously. She came to me,” Almodóvar said.

The Press Screening That Had to Stop

While Almodóvar was receiving his ovation in the Grand Théâtre Lumière, things took a more alarming turn across the Palais. About 15 minutes into the simultaneous press screening in the Bazin theater — ironically, during a hospital sequence — an elderly attendee collapsed in their seat. Loud yelps were heard, the person’s eyes were closed, and those nearby surrounded them as the film kept running. The ushers then cleared the entire theater.

The festival confirmed the incident in a statement: “The screening was immediately interrupted, and the theater evacuated to allow emergency services to assist them. The person was conscious and responsive before being transported to the hospital for further medical care. Once the intervention was completed, the screening resumed from the beginning of the film.”

Eyewitnesses on social media described hearing a loud scream and reported that the person appeared to suffer some kind of seizure. One attendee told Deadline the response felt disorganized: “It was a muddle and it seemed as though the festival didn’t have any protocol in place for such an emergency.”

Where Critics Land

The reviews have been warm but measured — the consensus being that this is unmistakably Almodóvar, and unmistakably minor Almodóvar. The craft is beyond dispute: Alberto Iglesias’ score, Antxón Gómez’s production design (not a single apartment in the film you wouldn’t want to live in), Pau Esteve Birba’s cinematography — particularly a bird’s-eye shot of Elsa and Patricia lying on white towels against Lanzarote’s black volcanic sand, wearing red and black — all land with the director’s signature visual intensity. Hot pink, as one critic put it, has never burned hotter.

Where critics diverge is on emotional access. Some find the film’s layers of self-critique genuinely thrilling — “a difficult but virtuoso piece of auto-fiction,” in The Wrap’s assessment. Others feel the double-proxy structure keeps the audience at arm’s length, that Almodóvar is working things out in his own head rather than inviting viewers to share the experience. The Hollywood Reporter noted that while Pain and Glory stung with “startling vulnerability and poignancy,” Bitter Christmas “stays somewhat at a distance for the audience, compelling but seldom affecting.”

Deadline’s review landed somewhere in the middle, comparing it favorably to the idea that even minor Fellini and minor Bergman is a gift — a line that, tellingly, Almodóvar put into Mónica’s mouth in the film itself.

Bitter Christmas is produced by Agustín Almodóvar for El Deseo. Sony Pictures Classics handles North American distribution, Warner Bros. releases in Spain and Mexico, and Curzon covers the U.K. and Ireland. The film has grossed around $3 million domestically in Spain since its March opening — more than The Room Next Door and Parallel Mothers managed, though well short of Pain and Glory.

As for whether he’ll return to English-language filmmaking, Almodóvar left the door open. “I would like to work again with Tilda and Julianne,” he said, referring to Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore. “So, perhaps in the future there will be another movie in English.”

For now, though, he’s back in Spanish — and back on the Croisette, where the crowd still cheers him all the way out the door.

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