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The films of Pedro Almodovar teem with characters who at once are and are not alter egos of the director. In film after film, the Spanish auteur mines his past for alternative selves, telling and retelling formative stories from his own life, plumbing the depths of his memory while exploring other lives he might have led. What can Almodovar's work tell us about the quest for self-knowledge-for understanding who we are and who we might yet become?

James Miller considers seven of Almodovar's most personal films, arguing that together they offer a revealing self-portrait of the director and his search for meaning. Beginning with Volver, Miller traces Almodovar's signature obsessions backward and forward through the director's filmography. Deeply shaped by the counterculture of the 1960s-which arrived belatedly in Franco's Spain-Almodovar has long been fascinated by the exhilarating power and devastating limitations of artistic and sexual transgression. In rich readings, Miller shows how Almodovar tests the blurry line between fiction and reality, the bounds of individual freedom, and the durability of a sense of self. In so doing, the director turns cinema into a form of philosophical investigation and self-exploration. A keenly observed, masterfully written portrait of one of world cinema's greatest creative forces, The Passion of Pedro Almodovar finds in film new ways to tell the story of a life.