There is something different about Pedro Almodovar’s Bad Education – in the context of our course. I’m not talking about the film’s explicit sexuality, its remarkable color palette, or the melodramatic theme of switched identities… This is the first time we are watching a film that follows the events we are studying by a substantial period. We’ll use this film from 2004 to think about the experience of dictatorship in Spain, the transition to democracy (1975-1978), and the so-called Madrid Scene (the Movida Madrileña of the 1980s). As you will see – and as we’ll discuss – it is very much a film about memory.

The film tells the story of the film director, Enrico Goded, and the visit of a long-lost (but not forgotten) friend, Ignacio (who now goes by the name Angel). So the film begins with a creative deity (God-ed) and a supplicant angel… From this beginning, Almodovar takes us on a journey back in time to 1977 (in a fictional account of the transition), the 1960s (in boarding school), 1977 (in the real world of the film), and back to 1980 (the present of the film). Make sense?

Pedro Almodovar, is a Spanish filmmaker you’d like to know, engaging and enormously influential. He is famous for films about desire and identity, films that blend dark humor and melodrama, films about people on the margins of society. Almodovar lived through the transition to democracy and made films that defined the spirit of the Movida Madrileña. He is not considered a political filmmaker, but the politics of contemporary Spain are just beneath the surface of his films.