Pedro Almodóvar received the 50th Chaplin Award last Monday at a gala held at Lincoln Center in New York, but the ceremony turned into a scene of strong political content.
In his acceptance speech, the Spanish director launched harsh criticism of President Donald Trump, denounced the persecution of immigrants, and compared the current situation in the United States with authoritarian regimes like Russia, China, and North Korea. Almodóvar’s harsh criticism of Donald Trump: “Authoritarian lunatic” Almodóvar opened his speech with a statement that left the audience silent.
“I doubted whether it was appropriate to come to a country governed by an authoritarian and narcissistic lunatic who does not respect human rights,” he said. During his speech, he denounced the disinformation campaign that, he said, the Trump administration is promoting, and defended migrant communities.
“Trump and his friends, millionaires and oligarchs, cannot convince us that the reality we see with our own eyes is the opposite of what we live in, no matter how much they twist their words. Immigrants are not criminals,” he emphasized. He also provided a definition regarding the war in Eastern Europe: “Zelensky is not a dictator. Putin is. It was Russia that invaded Ukraine.”
Almodóvar dedicated the award to deportees and culture. The filmmaker dedicated the Chaplin Award to the thousands of deportees in recent months, to trans actress Hunter Schafer, and to Harvard University, for their cultural resistance to what he described as “Trump’s war on knowledge and culture.”
And he delivered a direct message to the president: “He will go down in history as a catastrophe, as the greatest mistake of our time. His naiveté is only comparable to his violence.”
