San Sebastian 2025

From the cloister to Gaza, powerful films and opinionated audiences make themselves heard at San Sebastian.

Spanish director Alauda Ruiz de Azua won San Sebastian’s best film prize with her witty, paradoxical and often quite moving ‘Sundays’.

Spanish director Agustín Díaz Yanes delivers a gripping, action-packed but intellectually hollow thriller about an undercover woman police officer who infiltrates the Basque terrorist group ETA.

In wheatfields dotted with 800-year-old stone statues, hidden female desires burn in Zhang Zhongchen’s engrossing magical realist tale from the Chinese hinterlands.

Sleek, sophisticated and certifiably scary in parts, ‘Hidden Murder’ is a Spanish-Argentinian psychological thriller premiering in San Sebastian’s RTVE Galas sidebar.

Spanish-Brazilian director Sergio Oksman uses Kubrick’s ‘The Shining’ to reflect on the ghosts of his own life in the slender but intriguing hybrid documentary, ‘A Scary Movie;’.

Gently engaging the viewer with whimsical tales of two couples and reflections on the artistic process, Shô Miyake’s Locarno Golden Leopard winner ‘Two Seasons, Two Strangers’ skillfully plays a wide range of chords from melancholy to amusing, tragic to poetic.

Following the success of ‘Tasio’ on the festival circuit last year, the Basque Film Archive will present the restored versions of four 1980s medium-length feature at San Sebastián.

Colin Farrell gives a high-energy performance as a boozy con man gambling his life away in the casinos of Macau in director Edward Berger’s stylish but shallow thriller ‘Ballad of a Small Player’.

Nayra Ilic Garcia’s minimalist, somewhat impenetrable coming-of-age tale about a 15-year-old Chilean girl, ‘Cuerpo Celeste’, is set during the end of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship.

The life of a middle-class Spanish family is turned upside down when the 17-year-old daughter considers becoming a cloistered nun in Alauda Ruiz de Azua’s sly, funny and frequently moving ‘Sundays’.

A holiday homicide triggers a family crisis in Olmo Omerzu’s compelling psychological thriller ‘Ungrateful Beings’, which is clunky in places but saved by its intriguing premise and strong cast.

A new-old take on a not very believable serial killer haunting Japan, ‘SAI Disaster’ emphasizes the ordinary, dull, problematic lives of his victims in Yutaro Seki and Kentaro Hirase’s unremarkable second collaboration.

A wildfire out of control in rural Turkey threatens the house, livestock and resourcefulness of a little girl and her motherless family in Seyhmus Altun’s low-key, high-anxiety drama ‘As We Breathe’.

György Pálfi works with a plucky cast of real animals on ‘Hen’, a scrappy but technically impressive comic thriller about a rebellious bird on the run from the chicken-industrial complex.

Great performances and good direction save a predictable script in Alberto Rodriguez’s thriller ‘The Tigers’, bowing in competition at San Sebastian.

A working class father and daughter belong to a close-knit group of traditional wrestlers in an unexpectedly flamboyant, emotionally pitch-perfect story set on the Canary Islands, ‘Dance of the Living’.

Writer director John Skoog casts Denis Lavant as a real-life backwoods eccentric from Swedish history in his dramatically thin but compellingly bizarre Cold War drama ‘Redoubt’.

Women are prominently featured at San Sebastián 2025, from the poster to the subject of the Retrospective, and beyond.