BITTER CHRISTMAS              

Pedro Almodóvar returns with a deliciously tangled tale of desire, grief and the dangerous business of turning real life into fiction.

In 2004, Elsa (Bárbara Lennie) is a successful advertising director, creatively restless and struggling to process the death of her mother. At home she has Bonifacio (Patrick Criado) - her devoted, much younger boyfriend, a fireman who moonlights as a male stripper - but even that enviable distraction can’t stop her from unravelling.

When a crisis finally forces Elsa to stop, she escapes Madrid for the volcanic landscapes of Lanzarote with her friend Patricia, while the dramas, betrayals and intimate secrets of the people around her begin feeding an entirely different story.

Two decades later, filmmaker Raúl (Leonardo Sbaraglia) is struggling through a creative drought and writing a screenplay that starts to look suspiciously like Elsa’s life. And Raúl himself feels more than a little like Pedro Almodóvar - a filmmaker mining his own experiences and the lives of those closest to him for inspiration, while confronting the uncomfortable question of how much an artist is entitled to take.

As lovers, friends and private miseries become material, Almodóvar gleefully blurs the boundaries between autobiography, invention and exploitation. The result is a film within a film, filled with sex, friendship, loss, creative obsession and the unmistakable wit and sensuality of one of cinema’s great provocateurs.

Sexy, funny, melancholic and unmistakably Almodóvar, Bitter Christmas is a richly layered story about desire, creativity and what happens when the people you love become the raw material for your art.