Set to world premiere at 2023 Cannes Film Festival, here is the first official trailer for Strange Way of Life, Pedro Almodóvar’s short film, a queer western drama starring Ethan Hawke as Sheriff Jake and Pedro Pascal as cowboy Silva.
Also starring the film are José Condessa, Jason Fernández, Sara Sálamo, Erenice Lohan, Pedro Casablanc, George Steane, and Manu Ríos.
Sony Pictures Classics will release the film in the Fall.
A man rides a horse across the desert that separates him from Bitter Creek. He comes to visit Sheriff Jake. 25 years earlier, both the sheriff and Silva, the rancher who rides out to meet him, worked together as hired gunmen. Silva visits him with the excuse of reuniting with his friend from his youth, and they do indeed celebrate their meeting, but the next morning Sheriff Jake tells him that the reason for his trip is not to go down the memory lane of their old friendship…
“This is a queer western in the sense that there are two men, and they love each other, and they behave in that situation in an opposite way,” said Almodóvar on an episode of Dua Lipa: At Your Service. “What I can tell you about the film is that it has a lot of the elements of the Western. It has the gunslinger. It has the ranch. It has the sheriff. But what it has that most Westerns don’t have is the kind of dialogue that I don’t think a Western film has ever captured between two men. And now I think I’m telling you too much.”
Watch the official trailer for Strange Way of Life.