The Room Next Door

21.oktober: Førpremiere! Visningen introduseres av Hans Petter Blad (Oslo, 1962), forfatter og regissør. Han har nettopp git ut romanen «Den unge kvinnen» på Forlaget Oktober, og arbeider for tiden med «Beau-Geste», en dokumentarfilm der handlingen utspiller seg i Madrid og Lisboa: En film om hester og lidenskapen for dressur.

24.oktober Førpremiere under Escena24:

Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language feature presents a powerful reflection on mortality, dignity and friendship.

After the film, Daniel Ovalle Costal, professor at the Barlett School in London, and author of “A Canon of Queer Domesticity: Design Speculations» will hold a conversation about Almodóvar’s artistic choices in the film's residential scenography, and the capacity of queer design language to challenge mainstream residential solutions and validate dissident lifestyles.

The Room Next Door, based on the novel What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez, tells the story of Martha, a former war correspondent now terminally ill with cervical cancer and looking to reconnect with her old friend, Ingrid (Julianne Moore). Martha and Ingrid have drifted apart but when Martha asks Ingrid to be at her side in her last days, they will embark on a physical and emotional journey of self-reflection. 

The film continues the Spanish director’s interest in death that has been marking his latest projects like the semi-autobiographical Pain and Glory and Parallel Mothers, that pondered about the national scar of the Spanish Civil War.

Despite the jump to a new language the film is still characteristically a Pedro Almodóvar film that continuous the director’s career, eager for more stories to tell.

Architecture plays an important role in the narrative of the film; a good part of the film takes place in a rented modern villa in “upstate New York”. The fluidity of the space, the large windows opened to the lush vegetation and the interior design are masterly used by Almodóvar showing the director’s special sensitivity in the use of the cinematographic space.