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Famous Spanish director compares President Trump to dictator Franco
2025-04-30 17:29:55 / BOTA
Famous Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar harshly attacked US President Donald Trump while receiving an award in New York, according to "The Guardian".
Speaking at Lincoln Center on Monday evening, he said he had been torn about whether to travel to the US to receive the Chaplin Award.
"I doubted whether it was appropriate to come to a country ruled by a narcissistic authority that does not respect human rights," he said.
"Trump and his friends, millionaires and oligarchs, cannot convince us that the reality we are seeing with our own eyes is the opposite of what we are living, no matter how much he may twist the words, claiming that they mean the opposite of what they do. Immigrants are not criminals. It was Russia that invaded Ukraine," Almodovar declared.
"Mr. Trump, I am speaking to you and I hope you will listen to what I have to say. You will go down in history as the greatest mistake of our time. Your naivety is only comparable to your violence. You will go down in history as one of the greatest harms to humanity... You will go down in history as a catastrophe," he stressed.
The director, who shot scenes from his latest film, "The Room Next Door," outside the auditorium where he was speaking, compared his experience under Franco's Spain to life under Trump in today's US.
He attributed his flourishing as a filmmaker to his homeland's evolution into democracy in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
"It's impossible to explain what that feeling of absolute freedom meant to a young man who wanted to make films," Almodovar said.
Those who paid tribute to the director's speech included Dua Lipa, John Turturro, John Waters, Rossy de Palma, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Martin Scorsese, Tilda Swinton and Antonio Banderas.
Waters called Almodovar "the best director in the world," while Lipa praised his ability to "completely normalize transgender and gay roles or stories, something that these days seems like a pretty radical act."
Earlier this week, Karla Sofia Gascon, the Spanish actress who became the first transgender star nominated for an Oscar, expressed her reluctance to return to the US.
"If they want to discriminate against me because of my sexuality, then it's going to be very difficult," she told The Hollywood Reporter.
"But, I hope. I look forward to doing a million things in the United States because I think it's a wonderful place full of something that we've all longed for in this world, which is freedom, and we're losing that. We're losing that," she added.
"We are in a very complicated and difficult time," she said, adding that "I honestly feel like one of the first victims of all this hatred."
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