In writer/director Pedro Almodovar's Pain and Glory, Antonio Banderas plays Salvador Mallo, a film director in physical decline who reflects on his past as his present comes crashing down around him. Some of these reflections are in the flesh, others remembered - his childhood in the '60s, when he emigrated with his parents to a village in Valencia in search of prosperity; his first adult love in the Madrid of the '80s; the pain of the breakup of that love while it was still alive and intense; writing as the only therapy to forget the unforgettable; the early discovery of cinema; and the void, the infinite void created by the incapacity to keep on making films. Pain and Glory talks about creation, about the difficulty of separating it from one's own life and about the passions that give it meaning and hope. In recovering his past, Salvador finds the urgent need to recount it, and in that need he also finds his salvation.