Bad Education to open Cannes film festival

PARIS, Feb 20 (AFP) – The latest movie by Pedro Almodovar, “Bad Education”, is to open this year’s Cannes Film Festival, organisers said Friday, to the delight of the Spanish director.

“The joy I feel at the news that my latest film will inaugurate the next Cannes festival makes me feel more like a teenager than an adult,” Almodovar said by telephone from Madrid.

“When I was told, I felt myself again become the young man who made super 8mm films and for whom the Cannes festival has always been the biggest feast of cinema imaginable,” said the multi-award-winning director, who won a screenwriting Oscar last year for “Talk to Her”.

The Cannes Film Festival is to be held May 12-23 this year, and its jury is to be presided over by Quentin Tarantino, the US director of “Pulp Fiction” and “Kill Bill”.

The festival organisers did not say whether “Bad Education” was in the line-up of competition films to be judged by the jury. That list is to be released in late March.

Almodovar, 54, has won a large following around the world for his emotionally complex, often dark and sometimes kinky movies, which include
“Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown”, “All About my Mother” (for which he won a best director prize at Cannes in 1999), “Live Flesh” and “Talk to Her”.

The Cannes festival, the world’s pre-eminent international cinema event, usually showcases around two dozen new films in the main competition, scores of others in sideline events, and screens hundreds of others in the market section, where industry does business between the promotional parties under the Riviera sun.

Almodovar said the honour bestowed on “Bad Education”, a story about two boys who discover love, cinema and fear during the 1960s in a religious school and then renew their ties in the following decades, underlined the special welcome the French often reserved for his works.

“France has become my main audience, even more generous with my oeuvre than Spain, and I’m not just talking about at the box office,” he said.

“Getting to open the Cannes festival is the apogee of a honeymoon that I’ve been living with the French public over the years.”

Subject: France news