Last week, we brought you news of the Spanish Film Festival in London, in which Iberian directors struggled with their nation's cinematic identity and tried to come to terms with the fact that they are operating in a market where there is little interest in or knowledge of any Spanish film not bearing the Pedro Almodóvar imprint. The festival inspired the Guardian's Paul Julian Smith to contemplate the existence of an "Almodóvar Curse", in which the Volver director's success might ironically be bad news for the Spanish film industry as a whole.
Well, apparently, someone got word of the piece to the man himself (we like to think that Mr. Almodóvar is a regular Screengrab reader), andhe was inspired to fire off a response. His response is erudite and measured, if a tad defensive-sounding; he blames the fact that the vast majority of films shown in British theatres are English-language releases, with a miniscule 1.3% of all U.K. screens being devoted to non-English-language films not just from Spain, but from all other countries combined. "It is deeply unfair, and also rather silly, to blame me for an absence of Spanish films at UK cinemas," he says; "Interest cannot be monopolised. It can be 'attracted', or 'generated'. But it cannot be monopolised, because it belongs to the person interested...how could I possibly monopolise international interest; through some form of mass hypnosis?"
For the paper's part, Catherine Shoard, the film editor of the Guardian, suggests that Mr. Almodóvar may have missed the point of the piece: "We never intended to abuse Mr Almodóvar or to blame him for the lack of distribution of Spanish films in the UK...the only crime I believe the article accused Mr Almodóvar of was excellence. If the piece had a target, it was intended to be UK audiences for a degree of insularity and UK distributors for a level of timidity."
Aw, come on. Don't be like that. Fight! Fight! Fight!