04/05/2005 - Almodóvar is back with a film starring his former muse Carmen Maura. The collaboration between them had been interruped in 1988, following the hit Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

After the bittersweet experience of A Bad Education, which divided both critics and audiences, Pedro Almodóvar is back with Volver. The shooting of his new feature film is set to begin in July.
El Deseo, the production company run by the Spanish film enfant terrible and his brother Agustín Almodóvar, has published a press release describing Almodóvar's new project as a mix between Michael Curtiz's Midred Pierce and Frank Capra 's Arsenic and Old Lace combined with the naturalist surrealism from What Have I Done to Deserve this?. The filmmaker added the film will be set in Madrid "in the sparkling workingclass neighbourhoods, where people issued from several different regions of Spain share their dreams, life and fate with several other foreigners".
Three generations of women survive to the wind, the fire and death thanks to their goodness, boldness and a endless vitality. It's the return to the great female portraits after his two latest films, whose casting was almost exclusively male. Carmen Maura and Penélope Cruz will star the film which includes other four important characters, whose actors' names are still to be confirmed.
Volver is the long awaited return of Carmen Maura to the cinema of the director who is responsible for her most emblematic characters like the transexual from La Ley del Deseo (1987) and Pepa from Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988). After that film, for which she won her first Goya, the collaboration between the actress and the filmmaker have been interrupted until now.
Penélope Cruz, who still builds up her career on both sides of the Atlantic, will take of the Almodóvar's universe for the third time, after Live Flesh (1997) and All About my Mother (1999).

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