The veteran Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar has launched a broadside towards the US president, Donald Trump, whereas accepting an award in New York.
Speaking on stage on the Lincoln Center on Monday night, he stated he had been in two minds as as to whether to journey to the US to choose up his Chaplin award.
“I doubted if it was appropriate to come to a country ruled by a narcissistic authority, who doesn’t respect human rights,” he stated. “Trump and his friends, millionaires and oligarchs, cannot convince us that the reality we are seeing with our own eyes is the opposite of what we are living, however much he may twist the words, claiming that they mean the opposite of what they do. Immigrants are not criminals. It was Russia that invaded Ukraine.”
Almodóvar continued: “Mr Trump, I’m talking to you, and I hope that you hear what I’m going to say to you. You will go down in history as the greatest mistake of our time. Your naiveté is only comparable to your violence. You will go down in history as one of the greatest damages to humanity … You will go down in history as a catastrophe.”
The director, who shot scenes from his most up-to-date launch, The Room Next Door, outdoors the auditorium the place he was talking, in contrast his experiences rising up in Franco’s Spain with life beneath Trump in in the present day’s US.
He credited his homeland’s evolution into democracy in the late 70s and early 80s along with his personal flourishing as a director.
“It is impossible to explain what that feeling of absolute liberty meant for a young person who wanted to make films,” Almodóvar stated.
Those paying tribute to the director included Dua Lipa, John Turturro, John Waters, Rossy de Palma, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Martin Scorsese, Tilda Swinton and Antonio Banderas.
Waters referred to as Almodóvar “the best film-maker in the world” whereas Lipa praised his capability to “just completely normalise trans and gay roles or storylines, something that feels these days like quite a radical act”.
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Earlier this week, Karla Sofía Gascón, the Spanish actor who turned the primary trans star nominated for an Academy Award, expressed her hesitation about returning to the US.
“If they want to discriminate against me because of my sexuality, then it will be very difficult,” she instructed the Hollywood Reporter.
“But I hope so. I’m looking forward to doing millions of things in the United States because I think it’s a wonderful country full of something that we have all wished for in this world, which is freedom, and we are losing it. We are losing it.”
The actor went on to recommend that the backlash to her offensive tweets, which successfully dominated out the opportunity of her successful an Oscar, may very well be ascribed in half to anti-trans sentiment.
“We are in a very complicated and difficult time,” she stated, “in which I sincerely feel like one of the first victims of all this hate.”
