All About My Mother (1999) on Netflix
On his seventeenth birthday Esteban is killed while chasing an actress's autograph. His mother Manuela travels to Barcelona to find Lola, the transgender woman who is his other parent.
- Netflix3.8/5
- IMDb7.8/10110,699 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes98%
Trailer
Plot summary
Manuela works at a Madrid hospital, where she coordinates donor organ transplants, and raises her son Esteban on her own. Esteban, seventeen, wants to be a writer and wonders about the parent he has never met; Manuela has never told him about Lola, a transgender woman who lives in Barcelona and does not know the boy exists. After Esteban is killed on his birthday, Manuela permits his heart to be given to another patient, gives up her job and returns to Barcelona. There she finds her old friend Agrado, a transgender sex worker, and meets Rosa, a young nun who works in a shelter for sex workers. She also comes to know Huma Rojo, the actress her son admired, who is appearing on stage as Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about All About My Mother (1999)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Almodóvar recreated the accident scene from John Cassavetes' 1977 film Opening Night and made it the epicenter of All About My Mother's dramatic conflict.
- All About My Mother grew out of Almodóvar's earlier film The Flower of My Secret (1995), whose subplot about student doctors persuading grieving relatives to donate organs, and a mother whose teenage son is killed in a road accident, became its plot.
- The first English-language adaptation of any work by Pedro Almodóvar was the stage version of All About My Mother by Australian playwright Samuel Adamson, which premiered at the Old Vic in London's West End in September 2007 with Almodóvar's approval.
