Venice (AFP)

The Venice Film Festival on Thursday awarded a Golden Lion for his career to the Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar who, obviously happy, called this prestigious award "act of poetic justice".

The director, whom the director of the Venice Film Festival, the Italian critic Alberto Barbera, has described as "greatest and most influential" in Spanish cinema since Luis Buñuel, has so far received no awards from the main European festivals that are Cannes and Venice.

"Thirty years later, I am awarded the Golden Lion for a film of 1988. It is an act of poetic justice," said Pedro Almodovar, smiling, during a press conference that preceded the award ceremony.

The filmmaker was indeed rewarded for his famous opus "Women on the brink of the crisis of nerves", which had enthused the international public and the director Sergio Leone. It was projected Thursday in the great hall of the Mostra.

Thanks to the interwoven stories of four crazy women (Carmen Maura, Julieta Serrano, Maria Barranco, Rossy De Palma), colorful costumes and kitschy and pop decorations, Pedro Almodovar was catapulted onto the international scene.

"I was baptized here, in this festival, in 1983, with the film" Between the darkness, "said the filmmaker, remembering that at the time" participate in an international festival seemed a miracle. "

"I was so proud of the actresses, who were wonderful, they represented modern Spain," added the director who will celebrate his 70th birthday on September 25th.

Spain, he recalled, "was waking up from a dictatorship that had lasted 40 years" and "the most important of the + movida + (artistic movement in the years following the Franco dictatorship, ed), it was to no longer be afraid and to enjoy enormous freedom ".

"The wounded lion", as the Italian press calls it, received his prize with emotion. It comes in addition to two Oscars obtained for the melodramas "All about my mother" and "Speak with her".

- "Diversity" -

The filmmaker, known for his disenchanted and corrosive films, which has evolved into a more introspective cinema, has recognized himself as "the product of Spanish democracy". "My films show that it really exists, and when I started filming, we did not talk about diversity, so life was very different."

Homosexual claimed, he stressed wanting to "impose in his films all the diversity that exists": masochism, homosexuality, drugs, pornography, religion and anti-clericalism.

"All sexual orientations were welcome, my characters have moral autonomy, be they transsexuals, sisters or housewives," he said, admitting he was "fascinated by the changes the Spain at the time ".

"Madrid's street and night were endless, there was a great diversity and I trained at this university".

As for the color? it is for him "a reaction" to his land of origin: La Mancha (central Spain).

It is a region "extremely conservative, + Calvinist," where we see little color, very dry, the opposite of what I felt in me, "said the director, who says he does not remember seeing red in his childhood, "only the black of mourning".

© 2019 AFP