In a lengthy interview in Spain while promoting Bitter Christmas, Pedro Almodóvar said his next movie is planned for next year and signaled a clear shift back to Spanish filmmaking after a recent English-language detour. The remark landed like an editorial choice: not retirement, but a narrowing of focus.
What is Almodóvar saying about his Next Movie?
He is planning to shoot another film next year and has expressed a preference for working in Spain going forward. Pedro Almodóvar, film director, said, “I suspect that the rest of my career will continue to take place in Spain. ” That statement followed a decade in which he experimented with English-language projects — two short films, The Human Voice and Strange Way of Life, and a 2024 film, The Room Next Door — before returning to Spanish-language work with Bitter Christmas.
On the experience of working within American production systems he added, “Sometimes Americans complicate their lives too much, ” a comment that underlines why he might choose to concentrate his creative energy closer to home. The Room Next Door, starring Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, won the Golden Lion at Venice, yet even that success has not pulled him into a long-term transatlantic career path.
What is Bitter Christmas and who is involved?
Bitter Christmas, the film Almodóvar is currently promoting, looks to be very much in his established register. The film stars Leonardo Sbaraglia, Victoria Luengo and Patrick Criado. Its plot centers on a work-obsessed woman who, after the death of her mother, takes a holiday in Lanzarote with a friend; while there, their experiences begin to mirror a story being written by a screenwriter and a film director. The project has been described by the director as a kind of sister film to Pain and Glory, suggesting continued engagement with autobiographical themes and the blurred line between art and life.
Those elements — a vibrant aesthetic, melodrama and meta-narrative devices — place Bitter Christmas squarely within the Almodóvar canon even as it follows his brief experiments in English-language formats earlier this decade.
Why does this return to Spain matter for his career and cinema?
Almodóvar’s movies have long been tied to Spanish cultural and visual textures. The recent choice to stop pursuing further English-language films and to concentrate on work in Spain is both artistic and practical: he has said he finds American production structures often unnecessarily elaborate. That practical judgment is paired with an aesthetic impulse. Even after a high-profile English-language success, the director is opting to write and shoot where his storytelling instincts feel rooted.
At 76, he is not slowing down. Planning to shoot another film next year, he frames this phase of his career as focused rather than finished, a renewed investment in familiar collaborators, settings and themes.
Back in the interview room, promoting Bitter Christmas and reflecting on a decade of detours, Almodóvar articulated a simple, decisive orientation: a next movie that returns him to the language, people and production rhythms he knows best. Whether that choice brings a new creative peak, a quiet consolidation or both, the announcement closes one chapter of experimentation and opens another in which his Spanish films will once again be the primary measure of his work.
