IFC Films will release Official Competition (Competencia oficial), the Spanish comedy film starring Penélope Cruz and Antonio Banderas alongside Oscar Martínez and José Luis Gómez. Directed by Mariano Cohn, the film had its world premiere at the 2021 Venice Film Festival in competition, where it earned glowing reviews. IFC Films will release the film in 2022.
In Official Competition, an octogenarian millionaire pharmaceutical tycoon (José Luis Gómez) decides to finance a great work of cinema after having surveyed his legacy and finding it lacking in prestige. He purchases the rights to a Nobel Prize–winning novel about sibling rivalry and entrusts the property to enigmatic auteur Lola Cuevas (Penélope Cruz). A visionary conceptualist with a penchant for offscreen theatrics and micromanagement, Lola casts as her embattled co-leads a pair of veteran thespians who couldn’t be less alike: Iván Torres (Oscar Martínez) is a revered educator and legend of the stage much concerned with ethics and artistry, while Félix Rivero (Antonio Banderas) is a glamorous global star known mostly for brainless, bombastic entertainments.
Alternating between exacerbating the actors’ mutual antipathy and uniting them in their discomfort with her psychologically tumultuous rehearsal techniques, Lola seeks to capture the drama of two alpha males vying for the limelight — but it won’t be long before the gambit goes off the rails.
Watch the first official trailer for Official Competition (Competencia oficial).