Volver
In a Spanish village, Raimunda hides a body and holds her family together while her supposedly dead mother returns, unearthing an old secret of abuse.
Cannes Best Screenplay and Best Actress 2006 won
Raimunda, her sister and their daughter navigate work, poverty and a sudden death in a working-class corner of Madrid and rural La Mancha. When the mother they believed dead reappears, the reappearance forces buried family history into the open, including a long-hidden sexual abuse and the death that answered it.
The film sits well in a therapist's library for its treatment of mourning across generations, the way a returning figure can carry what was never grieved, and the slow reparation of the bond between mother and daughter after a wound that could not be spoken. It won Best Screenplay and Best Actress at Cannes in 2006.
Director
Pedro Almodóvar
Pedro Almodovar is a Spanish film director, born in 1949 in the rural region of La Mancha. He is known for Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, All About My Mother, Talk to Her, Volver, and Pain and Glory. His films return often to mothers and the children who carry them, to desire that refuses tidy shape, and to bodies marked by illness, age, and longing. Memory and loss move through the work, held in saturated color rather than explained.
Details
- 2006
- Spain
- Spanish
- Film