A portrait of desire and passion, of color and of Spain’s unique sense of humor. I can’t think about references without thinking of Almodóvar. He is free in his filmmaking, and he makes the rest of us feel free too.

A masterpiece about addiction: an addiction to cinema and an addiction to drugs. It captures the rawness of beauty. A very lucid dream.

The fine line between reality and fiction is always present in everything that captivates me. The film’s elegant, subtle, and brilliant meta-narrative completely fascinated me.

A Cuban documentary I watched countless times before ever visiting the island. It follows two Cuban women filmmakers who, after years of living apart, reconnect through cinema — through the intimate video letters one sends to the other, sharing her life from the opposite side of the world.

A hybrid of cinema and music executed brilliantly — a parody of success. There has never been a better way to bring any story closer to the audience than through comedy.

The elegance with which Spanish identity is portrayed in the atmosphere of a sobremesa is overwhelming. A live performance that feels like a beautifully choreographed scene from a film.

I have to include Sorrentino on this list. His work blends geometry of beauty, sarcasm, memory, identity, pleasure, and hedonism… proving that one can be both ostentatious and sensitive at the same time.

Ambition, creative process, and fashion. I always find it inspiring to step inside the creative processes of any discipline. And I always enjoy observing the egos of great geniuses.

The vivid and blurred colors, the silences, all that remains unsaid, everything merely hinted at, the invisible passing of time. Wong Kar-wai is a genius of the unseen.