Almodóvar's 'Bitter Christmas' to Close AFI Latin American Film Festival's 37th Edition
Pedro Almodóvar's Bitter Christmas will close the 37th AFI Latin American Film Festival on October 7, capping a three-week showcase of 43 films from 21 countries at the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center in Silver Spring, Maryland. The festival runs September 16 through October 7, timed to National Hispanic Heritage Month, and is one of North America's largest and longest-running showcases of Latin American cinema (Variety).
Opening night belongs to a different kind of spectacle. The Match, a documentary, revisits the 1986 World Cup quarter-final between Argentina and England through archival footage, with narration from players Gary Lineker and Jorge Valdano and new testimonials from others who were on the pitch. For a festival rooted in Latin American storytelling, opening with a football documentary — one that revisits a match freighted with political tension four years after the Falklands War — sets a charged tone.
Almodóvar's closing-night film is a comedy-drama that follows two self-obsessed filmmakers grappling with creative drought, each wondering whether inspiration has limits. It reunites the Spanish director with Argentine actor Leonardo Sbaraglia. Bitter Christmas screens at 7:00 p.m. on October 7 at the AFI Silver (AFI Silver).
The lineup also features Diego Luna's Ashes, his fourth directorial feature. It is an unconventional immigration drama about a young Mexican woman who travels to Spain with her brother to rejoin the mother who left them behind as children. Luna, best known to international audiences as an actor in Rogue One and Narcos: Mexico, continues a directing career that has moved steadily between Mexican and Spanish-language cinema.
Manuela Martelli's The Meltdown brings another Chilean voice to the program. The film is a coming-of-age thriller set in post-Pinochet Chile, a period that has produced a rich vein of recent Latin American cinema examining the aftermath of dictatorship.
The 2026 selection includes 12 U.S. and North American premieres, drawing from recent favourites on the international festival circuit. That mix of high-profile names and lesser-known titles is the festival's stock in trade — a curated window into what Latin American film-makers are making right now, much of it otherwise unavailable to U.S. audiences outside of festival circuits.
The programme has grown modestly year over year. The 2025 edition, announced last August, comprised 42 films from 20 countries; the 2026 edition adds one film and one country to that count (AFI).
General admission tickets are priced at $15 and were on sale as of the festival's announcement (AFI Silver). For audiences in the Washington, D.C. area, the festival offers a rare chance to catch these films on a big screen before — or in many cases instead of — any wider commercial release.
