ABOUT THE SERIES During our August “Daydreams and Nightmares” series at the Los Feliz 3, we pay tribute to a visionary filmmaker who has brought his unforgettable dreams to the big screen: Pedro Almodóvar. This short retrospective celebrates some of the filmmaker’s most uncompromising and subversive works, each of which present the uncensored reality of desire, which thereby challenged the U.S.’ longstanding puritan rating system. Enraptured by the films of Luis Buñuel as a young man, Almodóvar began his career making Super-8 films in Madrid and soon began writing and directing feature films that challenged societal norms with their frank depictions of sexuality. In MATADOR, Almodóvar cast Antonio Banderas as Ángel, a young man drawn into the gory game of a bullfighter and a lawyer (Nacho Martínez and Assumpta Serna) who kill for pleasure. With THE LAW OF DESIRE, Almodóvar explored the love triangle of gay filmmaker Pablo (Eusebio Poncela), the young man who stalks him (Banderas) and Pablo’s transgender sister, Tina (Carmen Maura), whose past hides an incestuous secret. Both films originally received X ratings upon their theatrical releases and went on to adopt the NC-17 after the rating’s invention. Almodóvar’s dark comedy TIE ME UP! TIE ME DOWN!, which follows a psychiatric patient’s (Antonio Banderas) kidnapping of a former porn star (Victoria Abril), was one of the key films instrumental in bringing about the NC-17 rating in 1990. After the film’s original X rating release in 1989, the MPAA scrambled to deliver the hardly more benign NC-17 rating the following year. In 2004, Almodóvar received yet another NC-17 rating with BAD EDUCATION, a film inspired by the director’s boarding-school days and early love affair with cinema, which captures the reunion of boyhood friends who endeavor to adapt a true-life story of abuse for the screen. Despite his career-long battle with the MPAA, Almodóvar has remained committed to bringing his surreal, yet honest visions of the world to life. Join us on Wednesdays and Thursday throughout August at the Los Feliz 3 to see these fearless works on the big screen!