When Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar accepted an award from the Lincoln Center on Monday evening, he delivered a broadside against Donald Trump in his first 100 days.
Receiving the center’s Chaplin Award, Almodóvar told the crowd, “I doubted if it was appropriate to come to a country ruled by a narcissistic authoritarian leader who doesn’t respect human rights, and whom it seems nothing can stop on his race to change fragile world balance. Trump and his friends, millionaires and oligarchs, cannot convince us that the reality we are seeing with our own eyes is the opposite of what we are living, however much he may twist the words, claiming that they mean the opposite of what they do.”
Almodóvar added, “Immigrants are not criminals. [Ukrainian President] Zelensky is not a dictator. Putin is. And no matter now much Trump denies it, it was Russia that invaded Ukraine.”
The director also cited Trump’s attacks on transgender rights, citing the case of transgender actress Hunter Schafer, star of HBO’s Euphoria. She has said that her U.S. passport lists her as a male, even though she selected female when filling in the application. Almodóvar called such new policies “cruel.”
“Mr. Trump, I’m talking to you,” the director said. “Mr. Trump, I hope that you hear what I’m going to say to you. You will go down in history as the greatest mistake of our time. Your naiveté is only comparable to your violence. You will go down in history as one of the greatest damages to humanity since the beginning of the century.. You will go down in history as a catastrophe.”
He dedicated his award to the “thousands deported in recent weeks,” as well as to Schafer and to Harvard University. He recognized the latter institution for not surrendering to Trump’s “war on knowledge and culture.”
Almodóvar also said that he was “very worried” about the power outage that has been impacting Spain. The blackout has affected Spain, Portugal and parts of France, and has halted travel and transportation and disrupted other operations. The cause is still under investigation.
The Chaplin Award was named for Charlie Chaplin after he accepted an honor from Lincoln Center in 1972. That had been his first trip to the United States in 20 years, after he went into exile in Europe at the height of the Red Scare. During a trip to London in 1952, his reentry permit to the U.S. was revoked Chaplin had been the target of gossip columnists and of government investigations for his political leanings, although he was not a member of the Communist party.
