Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother is a beautiful, joyous film about connection and the families we choose for ourselves, not just the families we’re connected to through biology. It’s surprising how this exuberant joy pervades so much of the film – even in the midst of all the tragedy, grief, and melodrama. And just as the film explores the ways that our notions of family can be fluid, it’s also honest about the fluidity of gender and sexual orientation within this close-knit family of women that forms in late-90s Barcelona. At twenty-years-old, there is a clumsiness to the ways Almodóvar addresses trans issues, yet the film is still filled with so much warmth and empathy for all of its characters – gay and straight, trans and cis – something that was almost unheard of in such a popular film of its time. Almodóvar’s colors saturate the screen, as they often do, bringing us into this heightened reality that runs parallel to our own, a world that acknowledges the struggles of his female characters, yet provides them with miraculous moments of grace, connection, acceptance, and agency that they would never get in our own bigoted and misogynistic reality. The more I watch Almodóvar’s films, the more I see them – not as strict melodrama, but as adult fairy tales filled with wonder, awe, tragedy, and so much beauty.