Emma Suarez, Adriana Ugarte Set For Pedro Almodovar’s Next, ‘Silencio’
MADRID – Spanish actresses Emma Suarez and Adriana Ugarte will topline “Silencio,” the next film from Pedro Almodóvar, a “female universe drama,” in Almodóvar’s words, charting one woman’s life between 1985 and the present day.
“Silencio” is set up at Madrid’s El Deseo, the Spanish production label founded by Pedro and brother Agustin Almodovar. Agustin Almodovar and Ester Garcia produce.
Almodovar’s 20th feature, “Silencio” will go into production in May, shooting over much of Spain. In it, Ugarte, who broke through with 2013 period TV series “The Time in Between,” and Suarez, a respected film actress first seen in Julio Medem’s 1992 debut “Cows” and prized for 2010 Karlovy Vary winner “The Mosquito Net,” will play respectively a younger and older Julieta, a woman “struggling to survive on the verge of madness,” according to a Thursday press release.
“’Silence’ talks about inevitable destiny, a guilt complex, the unfathomable mystery which makes us abandon the ones we love, excising them out of our life as if they had never meant anything to us, and about the pain this abandonment causes in the victim,” Pedro and Agustin Almodovar’s production house El Deseo confirmed Thursday. “Only a miracle will save” Julieta. But miracles sometimes happen,” their press release concludes.
The film’s titular silence refers to Julieta’s daughter, abandoned by Julieta, and fruit of a relationship with a Galician fisherman, played by Spain’s Dario Grao (“Palm Trees in the Snow,” “The Mule”).
Argentina’s Dario Grandinetti, a memorable co-male lead in Almodovar’s “Talk to Her,” limns Julieta’s adult lover.
In a gallery of supporting roles, often with actors outside his regular circle of secondary thesps, Inma Cuesta (“Three Many Weddings) plays a faithful, and unfaithful, friend, Nathalie Poza (“Truman”) a woman who condems Julieta’s behavior, Pilar Castro (“Family United”) an acquaintance, Michelle Jenner (“Isabel,” “Open Windows”) a childhood friend, Susi Sanchez (“Truman,” “I’m So Excited”) Julieta’s mother and Joaquin Notario (“DarkBlueAlmostBlack”) her father.
Returning to a femme drama, a film mode that has given Almodóvar some of his greatest successes — from 1995’s “The Flower of My Secret” through 1999’s “All About My Mother,” a foreign language film Academy Award winner, to 2006’s “Volver,” with Penelope Cruz, reckoned one of the best films Almodóvar has ever directed – “the tone of ‘Silencio’ will be very different to that of ‘The Flower of My Secret’ and ‘Volver,’ other dramas with women, mothers, daughters, neighbors and absent fathers,” the press release stated.
Emiliano de Pablos contributed to this report.
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