Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar Caballero was BOTD in 1949. Born in a rural village near Castile, he was sent to boarding school in the hope he would become a priest. Against his family’s wishes, he moved to Madrid in 1967, and became a key player in La Movida Madrileña, Spain’s post-fascist counterculture. His early films Pepi, Luci, Bom, Laberinto de pasiones (Labyrinth of Passion) and Entre tinieblas (Dark Habits) were saturated with sex, drugs, nymphomaniac nuns and mocking of authority figures, expressing the sexual and political anarchy of La Movida. In 1986, he established the production company El Deseo (Desire) with his brother Augustín, who has since produced all his films. He achieved international recognition for his 1988 comedy Mujeres Al Borde De Un Ataque De Nervios (Women on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown), which was Oscar-nominated for Best Foreign Film. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s he honed an idiosyncratic and proudly queer aesthetic, featuring vivid colours, transgressive sexuality and references to the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks and Douglas Sirk, typically focusing on the romantic lives of women, gay and trans characters. His films launched the careers of Spanish actors Antonio Banderas, Penélope Cruz, Javier Bardem, Carmen Maura and the fabulous Rossy de Palma. His best known film, 1999’s Todo sobre mi madre (All About My Mother), a melodrama about a grieving mother who reconnects with her trans ex-husband, was an international hit, winning the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. In 2002, he won an Oscar for his screenplay for Hable Con Ella (Talk to Her), becoming one of the few non-English-language screenwriters to be so honoured. He turned to darker territory with the sexual psychodramas La mala educación (Bad Education), Los abrazos rotos (Broken Embraces) and La piel que habito (The Skin I Live In), alternated with warmer female-centred melodramas Volver and Julieta. His 2019 film Dolor y gloria (Pain and Glory), an autobiographical portrait of an ailing filmmaker, won numerous awards for Banderas, a feat repeated with Cruz in his 2021 baby-swap drama Madres paralelas (Parallel Mothers). In recent years, he has shifted into English-language filmmaking, including the gay cowboy romance Strange Way of Life with Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal, and The Human Voice with Tilda Swinton, adapted from Jean Cocteau‘s play La voix humaine. His 2024 feature-length film The Room Next Door, starring Swinton and Julianne Moore as friends involved in a euthanasia pact, won Almodòvar the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. Openly gay since forever, he has been in a relationship with actor Fernando Iglesias since 2002, sensibly maintaining separate apartments. Beloved for his joyous and non-judgmental representation of LGBTQ communities and fearless exploration of sexual taboos, he is arguably the most important queer filmmaker of the 20th century.