This week on Palomitas, we're diving into what many consider Pedro Almodóvar's masterpiece – and the film that made him a global name. Todo sobre mi madre (All About My Mother, 1999) won Best Director at Cannes and the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, and remains one of his most emotionally powerful works.

Manuela, a nurse in Madrid, loses her teenage son Esteban in a road accident just as he sets out to find the father he never knew. Her journey to Barcelona in search of Lola – a transsexual sex worker dying of AIDS – leads her to a new family of women: the pregnant nun Rosa, the actress Huma Rojo, her troubled co-star Nina, and the irrepressible Agrado.

Professor Mark Allinson, author of A Spanish Labyrinth: The Films of Pedro Almodóvar (2001) and Academic Director at the University of Porsmouth, joins us to explore:

– how Almodóvar rewrites melodrama's rules

– how the film prioritises the 'logical' family over the 'biological' one

– what character Agrado's famous monologue – ”the more you become like what you have dreamed for yourself, the more authentic you are” – says about performance, gender, and identity.

We discuss the film's web of references (All About Eve, A Streetcar Named Desire, Lorca, Douglas Sirk), the startling restraint of the accident scene, and the ending's uneasy question: are we talking about genuine hope, or survival through endless substitution?

Selected scholarship cited in this episode:

• Mark Allinson, 2000. A Spanish Labyrinth: The Films of Pedro Almodóvar (London: I.B. Tauris).

• Linda Craig, 2010. ”From national to transnational in Pedro Almodóvar's All About My Mother,” Transnational Cinemas 1(2), 161–174.

• Ernesto R. Acevedo-Muñoz, 2004. ”The Body and Spain: Pedro Almodóvar's All About My Mother,” Quarterly Review of Film & Video 21(1), 25-38.

• Paul Julian Smith, 2014. Desire Unlimited: The Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar (London: Verso). 3rd edn.