Marisa Paredes and Elena Anaya to appear at 9th FICM

Sofia Ochoa/ Translated by Cindy Hawes

Other elements of the festival program were presented on Sept. 29.

This is the first film Antonio Banderas and Almodóvar have made together in 21 years. They were regular collaborators in the 1980s and became famous together. In The Skin I Live In, Banderas plays Doctor Ledgard, a surgeon who, following the death of his wife after she was burned in a car crash, invents a skin that can withstand any kind of damage. To test it, he needs to find a guinea pig.

Marisa Paredes, who acted in the director's film Talk to Her (Hable con ella) in 2005, plays Marilia, Ledgard's accomplice. Speaking about her and the character she plays in an interview for Sight & Sound, Almodóvar said,

"I like to see how time passes. Life changes us all physically. With Marisa and Carmen I've been closer to that process, so it's more immediate for me. Marisa is still a very beautiful woman, but here I wanted something different to All About My Mother – a figure like 'Ma' Baker, one of those matriarchs who head crime families. I wanted to draw on Marisa's tragic vein. Marilia is the character who is most conscious of the air of fatality that hangs over her family, and it's a fate that she battles with."

When the director began the adaptation of the script, based on Thierry Jonquet 's novel Tarántula (1984), he envisioned Penélope Cruz in the leading role with Banderas, but eventually decided on Elena Anaya, to play Vera, the woman who appears with a mask and is dressed in skin-colored material in the trailer. Jean Paul Gautier designed this last costume for Almodóvar who explicitly asked for stitches that looked like scars on what appeared as a second skin.

If you'd like to see the trailer of The Skin I Live In, click here.

Consult the catalog of 9th FICM here.

Consult the program and schedule of 9th FICM here.