Raúl is a cult filmmaker in the midst of a creative crisis.
When tragedy strikes one of his closest collaborators, he draws inspiration from it to write his next film. Little by little, he imagines Elsa, a filmmaker in the midst of writing a script, whose journey begins to mirror his own.
The two filmmakers become two sides of the same character, in a game of mirrors where the raw honesty of autofiction reveals as much as it destroys. But how far can one go to tell a story?
Directed by : Pedro ALMODÓVAR
Year of production: 2026
Country: Spain
Durée : 112 minutes
1CAST LIST
BÁRBARA LENNIE: ELSA
LEONARDO SBARAGLIA: RAÚL
AITANA SÁNCHEZ-GIJÓN: MÓNICA
VICTORIA LUENGO: PATRICIA
PATRICK CRIADO: BONIFACIO
MILENA SMIT: NATALIA
QUIM GUTIÉRREZ: SANTI
WITH THE COLLABORATION OF:
ROSSY DE PALMA: GABRIELA
CARMEN MACHI: DOCTOR
GLORIA MUÑOZ: ELSA’S MOTHER
AND AMAIA ROMERO
TECHNICAL LIST
WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY PEDRO ALMODÓVAR
PRODUCER: AGUSTÍN ALMODÓVAR
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER: ESTHER GARCÍA
MUSIC: ALBERTO IGLESIAS
DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: PAU ESTEVE BIRBA
EDITOR: TERESA FONT (AMAE)
PRODUCTION DESIGN: ANTXON GÓMEZ
SOUND: SERGIO BÜRMANN
COSTUME DESIGN: PACO DELGADO
MAKEUP DESIGN: ANA LÓPEZ-PUIGCERVER
HAIR DESIGN: MANOLO GARCÍA
2SHORT SYNOPSIS
Bitter Christmas tells two alternating stories, one starring Elsa, an advertising
director, in 2004, during a long weekend in December. The second takes place in
2026 and stars Raúl, a screenwriter and director who is writing a script that we soon
discover is the story of Elsa, her boyfriend Bonifacio, and her friends Patricia and
Natalia. Mixed with fiction, Elsa is, in a way, Raúl’s alter ego, who resorts to
autofiction as a solution to a long period of creative drought. He looks inside himself,
and he can’t help but also look at the people who make up his most intimate
universe: his partner and his assistant.
The film narrates the close relationship between reality and fiction, between
inspiration and life, raising the debate about the limits of autofiction.
LONG SYNOPSIS
Bitter Christmas tells two parallel stories (one mirroring the other) and how they
interact in the film’s final stretch. The first story takes place in December 2004 and
the second in the summer of 2026.
At times, it resembles a musical. Elsa meets a man who will love her at a key
moment in her life while he is dancing in a strip club. In addition to being a stripper,
he is also a firefighter. And there is also a woman, who is Elsa’s friend and colleague
and who has been repeatedly abandoned and humiliated by her husband. She will
find the strength to quit him after listening to a song by Chavela Vargas that is about
an abandoned lover. They are joined by a third woman, Natalia. She is a young
mother who is still mourning the death of her son.
These stories take place in 2004, during the long a long weekend in early December,
with the streets of Madrid taken over by the imminent Christmas season. As a matter
of fact, this is really the only Christmas element in the story, the time in which the
drama of these friends unfolds. Bitter Christmas is the quite the opposite of a
Christmas story.
The other story, which alternates with the one set in 2004, takes place in the summer
of 2026 and is about a successful fifty something screenwriter and director who is
struggling with a long creative crisis. It won’t be long before the viewer discovers that
Raúl Rossetti, as he is called, is writing on his computer the story of Elsa and of the
3other two women: their loves, their losses, their work, and their pains are the
elements that fuel Raúl’s inspiration, in which he naturally reflects himself. Memory
mixed with fiction is always fiction.
Although not in a literal way, Elsa’s character is Raúl’s alter ego. She is also a
director, but of commercials. Ten years earlier, she had directed two films, but they
both flopped. Nevertheless, over time, they became cult films.
Seeing the brutalist villa where Raúl lives and the work proposals that his assistant
shares with him, we understand that he is not only a successful director but that his
life has always been engulfed by the act of filmmaking. As he approaches sixty, his
need to create stories is as pressing, if not more so, than when he started working
thirty-five years earlier. Writing and directing is the only way he feels alive.
He lives quite a lonely life, alongside his faithful partner Santi, with hardly any social
life. At this point in his life and career, he can only find inspiration within himself. So
far, he had always refused to do so, but faced with the urgency to continue creating
stories, he cannot help but turning to his own life for inspiration. He looks inside
himself, but also at the few people who make up his universe, who are his partner
and his assistant. In the end, he will have to face reproach for this personal
appropriation of the lives of others, however fictionalized they may be in his script.
CREATION/LIFE
Among other matters, Bitter Christmas reflects on the connections between
creation and reality, with life itself. And how a film can rebel against itself,
questioning its raison d’être.
This meta-cinematic and Pirandellian game also questions the ethics of the
storyteller. In the case of this film, the creator resorts to autofiction. He talks about
himself (in a cryptic way) but also about how everything and everyone around him
influences him (in a much less cryptic way). Is there anything in the lives of others
that is off limits to him or, as a creator, does he have an unlimited right to draw
inspiration from everything around him, with the sole justification that the lives of
others are part of his own and, therefore, belong to him? What are the limits of
autofiction? Do those limits really exist for the creator hungry for inspiration, who
4sometimes only achieves it by immersing himself in everything around him,
including (and above all) the pain of others?
Amarga Navidad (Bitter Christmas) by Pedro Almodóvar: Color switches sides
“When I am filming, I feel like a painter.” In Pedro Almodóvar’s work, color is not simply for decoration, it’s a language. In Amarga Navidad (Bitter Christmas), shown in Competition, the Spanish filmmaker uses his color palette as a power system. The characters’ clothes give away what they are concealing, and shades of fiction taint the shades of reality. A colorful reading of the artist’s ninth film presented in the Official Selection.
Amarga Navidad (Bitter Christmas) follows two parallel stories: one about Raúl Rossetti (Leonardo Sbaraglia), a screenwriter-director suffering from writer’s block, who takes inspiration for his next film from the life of Mónica (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón), his assistant of twenty years; and the story of Elsa (Bárbara Lennie), also a director and Raúl’s fictional mirror image. Raúl sends his character to Lanzarote to grieve.
Raúl lives in a world bathed in mustard and gold tones. His sweaters, his home decor, the yellow light of his brutalist villa—everything points to a man who has constructed a world made to meet his own requirements. The color suggests self-sufficiency and seclusion, but then there’s his blue polo shirt (cold and clinical) on the day the screenwriter walks beside Mónica. Betrayal can be seen in his clothing before it’s revealed in his words, even before it enters Raúl’s consciousness.
Then comes the twist. Mónica arrives dressed in mustard yellow to settle the score. Raúl’s “shade,” his color, is being worn by the woman he has fictionalized without asking for permission. He is wearing a knitted black and gold polo shirt. The transition is a subtle one, but everything has flipped. Raúl believed he had turned Mónica into a character, but instead she is now throwing his own color back at him as a kind of rebuke.
In Lanzarote, the color palette shifts. The house where Elsa (Raúl’s fictional counterpart) comes to mourn (white, minimalist, designed in the style of César Manrique, who made Lanzarote his laboratory) offers a counterpoint to Madrid’s saturated tones. A white that breathes, that creates space. This is where Elsa rediscovers her love of writing, and it is also here, on the black lava, that Elsa’s scarlet dress, contrasting with Natalia’s (Milena Smit) black dress as she mourns her son, creates one of the film’s most striking images – two women, two ways of dealing with loss, opposed by color alone, without the need for a single word. This is the defining characteristic of autofiction: it changes the color of whatever it touches.
