Volver

Pedro Almodóvar's Volver won an unusual collective Best Actress prize at the 59th Cannes Film Festival in May 2006, shared between Penélope Cruz, Carmen Maura, Lola Dueñas, Blanca Portillo, Yohana Cobo and Chus Lampreave. This collective recognition for the entire female ensemble cast is one of only a handful of times in Cannes history that the Best Actress prize has been awarded to a group rather than to a single actress. The film also won the Best Screenplay prize at the same festival.

The film is the eighth Almodóvar-Cruz collaboration, the relationship that had begun with the small role in Live Flesh (1997) and that would extend through Broken Embraces (2009), I'm So Excited! (2013), Pain and Glory (2019), Parallel Mothers (2021) and beyond. Volver earned Cruz her first Academy Award nomination for Best Actress at the 79th ceremony in 2007, the first Spanish-speaking actress to receive a lead-actress Oscar nomination. The Almodóvar-Cruz partnership is now widely treated alongside the Almodóvar-Banderas relationship and the earlier Almodóvar-Maura partnership as one of the central director-actress collaborations in contemporary European cinema.

The supporting cast (Maura, Dueñas, Portillo, Cobo and Lampreave) are largely Almodóvar regulars from his earlier features, with Carmen Maura returning to work with him for the first time in twenty years (since Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown in 1988) after a long personal estrangement; their reconciliation around Volver was widely covered in Spanish press. Cinematography is by José Luis Alcaine and the score is by Alberto Iglesias. The film grossed over $85 million worldwide and was Almodóvar's most commercially successful work to date at the time of release.