' ALMODOVAR'S -FILMS & WRITINGS- HONOURS '

 

In ' The Last Dream, ' Spain's foremost director looks back at his past. Pedro Almodovar is widely considered Spain's greatest living filmmaker, but he sees himself as a writer first - a ''fabulist,'' in his telling.

His extravagant plots took twists that were hard to to predict or even pin down. The tale of two men who form a bond looking over two comatose women in '' Talk to Her.''

The story of a plastic surgeon who operates on a captive man, changing him to a woman against his will in '' The Skin I Live In.''

Of his more than 20 feature films, Almodovar wrote or co-wrote nearly all of them. He had probably spent more days at a writing desk than on a set.

As it turned out, he had been writing other things, too - short stories, diary entries, a few unclassifiable essays - nearly the entire time he was making films. The tales sat in several mysterious blue folders, collected by his assistant Lola Garcia over the course of the director's many moves to different apartments in Madrid.

In 2022, at the urging of the Spanish literary editor Jaume Bonfill, Almodovar had a look at what had been saved over the years.

 '' It was like seeing a dimension of Pedro that I didn't know, '' said Bonfill, adding that the manuscripts they sorted through contained writings the director had composed as a teenager as well as items Almodovar had seemingly written decades later.

The collection, '' The Last Dream,'' will be published in English on Sept. 24 by HarperVia.

The World Students Society thanks Nicholas Casey.