CANNES: With "Julieta", which premieres at the Cannes Film Festival on Tuesday, director Pedro Almodovar returns to the "feminine universe" in trademark colourful fashion.

The film, starring Emma Suarez as the older woman and Adriana Ugarte as her younger self, shows a mother drifting into depression after her daughter disappears. Her husband Xoan, played by Daniel Grao, has died several years beforehand.

"I think I have come back to a place – a place that I will never leave all together which is the universe of women - the feminine universe," Almodovar, who won the Best Director award in Cannes for "All About my Mother" in 1999, said.

He has not made a woman-focussed film since "Volver" ten years ago, and in "Julieta" he also explores another favourite theme - mothers.

"I have done lots of movies about mothers but I believe this mother ... if you compare her with other mothers, she's the most vulnerable mother," he told a news conference on Tuesday.

"If we compare her to all other mothers in my films who are all powerful women with an ability to struggle which seems above human - but I turned Julieta her into the victim of losses."

Almodovar's 20th movie is once again full of colours - red, orange and blue - giving the film a unique texture.

"I'm the son of technicolor. The first movies I remember as a child were in technicolor, very bright, contrasted colours. My films can be somewhat baroque, and of course I'm a child of the 1960s ... all of this led to an exaggerated use of colour."

Questioned about his and his brother's name being cited in the Panama Papers as having ties with an offshore company in the 1990s, he said: "If the Panama papers were a film ... we wouldn’t even be extras in that film."