On the day after his 70th birthday, Pedro Almodvar was recovering from jet lag. He had recently traveled from his home in Madrid to New York City, where hed been summoned to promote his exquisite new movie, Pain and Glory . While getting his time zones in order, Almodvar received two wonderful gifts the best he could imagine upon entering his eighth decade. In the United States, Donald Trump s potential impeachment became a reality. And in Spain, the high court approved plans to exhume the remains of former dictator Francisco Franco.

Two strikes against fascism, I suggested? Absolutely, Almodvar replied. Absolutely.

The most famous Spanish director alive, Almodvar has been warring against authoritarian rule since the moment he picked up a camera. His films celebrate freedom of expression, humanizing transgressive subjects such as sinful nuns (Dark Habits), gay lust (Law of Desire), botched suicide (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown), ritual bondage (Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!), transgender womanhood (All About My Mother), the specter of death (Talk to Her), sexual abuse in the Catholic Church (Bad Education) and murder (Volver). Almodvar fuses melodrama, farce and melancholy, always avoiding preachiness; his plots often dont coalesce until their final minutes, by which point they are so layered with meaning that no sermon is necessary. He is arguably the worlds premier iconoclast filmmaker, and inarguably one of its best.

Almodvars work periodically draws from his own life, but Pain and Glory is the closest he has come to a memoir in movie form. Over the years, he said, publishing companies have asked him to write an autobiography, but he always refused. I thought, really, that all my life is in the 21 movies that I did, Almodvar said. This is the first time he consciously created a protagonist who doubles as his analog.