Last week, we brought you news of the Spanish Film Festival in London, in which Iberian directors struggled with their nation's cinematic identity and tried to come to terms with the fact that they are operating in a market where there is little interest in or knowledge of any Spanish film not bearing the Pedro Almodóvar imprint.  The festival inspired the Guardian's Paul Julian Smith to contemplate the existence of an "Almodóvar Curse", in  which the  Volver director's success might ironically be bad news for the Spanish film industry as a whole.

Well, apparently, someone got word of the piece to the man himself (we like to think that Mr. Almodóvar is a regular Screengrab reader), andhe was inspired to fire off a response.   His response is erudite and measured, if a tad defensive-sounding; he blames the fact that the vast majority of films shown in British theatres are English-language releases, with a miniscule 1.3% of all U.K. screens being devoted to non-English-language films not just from Spain, but from all other countries combined.  "It is deeply unfair, and also rather silly, to blame me for an absence of Spanish films at UK cinemas," he says; "Interest cannot be monopolised.  It can be 'attracted', or 'generated'.  But it cannot be monopolised, because it belongs to the person interested...how could I possibly monopolise international interest; through some form of mass hypnosis?"

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Pedro Almodóvar is one of the most critically acclaimed directors of his generation.  The shelf-haired auteur has produced film after film of stylish visuals, off-kilter humor, sexual frankness and emotional depth.  He's one of the few filmmakers on the international scene whose very name is enough to open a movie and make it profitable.  And he's managed to put his homeland of Spain on the cinematic map like no other filmmaker since Buñuel -- and without spending half his life in Mexico and France, to boot.  By almost any reckoning, any country would consider him a godsend to their film industry.

So why do more and more people in the world of Spanish film keep talking about something called "the curse of Almodóvar"?

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