Bleak depictions of sickness and death, surprise autumnal comebacks and testosterone-heavy documentaries were the big winners at the 72nd San Sebastián film festival. Across 10 storm-lashed days, the long-running Basque cinematic jamboree featured some contentious prize-winners and dubious celebrity vanity projects, but also some knockout performances and admirably ambitious cinematic experiments too.
San Sebastián has long been a reliably strong showcase for female film-makers. For the last four consecutive years, women directors have taken home the Golden Shell for Best Film: Dea Kulumbegashvili in 2020, Alina Grigore in 2021, Laura Mora in 2022 and Jaione Camborda in 2023. Which made this year’s big winner, Basque director Albert Serra’s bullfighting documentary Tardes de Soledad (Afternoons of Solitude), all the more controversial. This blood-splattered close-up portrait of champion matador Andres Roca Rey is undeniably a fascinating insider snapshot of the high-camp, high-stakes showmanship that underscores the glitter-suited machismo of bullfighting culture, but it is also features extended scenes of bulls being tortured to death for public entertainment. Despite protests from animal rights groups, Serra’s operatic orgy of violence still won the jury over.
Jointly awarded to two debutants, San Sebastián’s Silver Shell prize for Best Director also had a local flavour. It was split between Spaniard Pedro Martín-Calero for his visually striking psycho-horror thriller El Llanto (The Wailing) and UK-based Portuguese writer-director Laura Carreira for On Falling, a low-key but diligent portrait of an alienated migrant worker cracking under the pressure of her low-wage warehouse job. Meanwhile, the Best Screenplay prize went to François Ozon and Philippe Piazzo for Quand Vient L’Automne (When Fall is Coming), Ozon’s bittersweet depiction of a rustic French family torn apart by festering grudges and random tragedies.
Sadly, most of San Sebastián’s splashy, starry premieres were disappointing misfires. The much-hyped opening film, French director Audrey Diwan’s feminist re-imaging of the sleazy soft-porn classic Emmanuelle, was widely dismissed as a limp and pointless dud. Closing gala We Live in Time, a clunky romantic dramady directed by John Crowley, which stars Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield as a young London couple facing a grim cancer dilemma, was also far less less witty or moving than it wanted to be. Meanwhile the European premiere of Joshua Oppenheimer’s all-star post-apocalyptic musical, The End, divided critics with its marathon runtime and overreaching ambition.
But the biggest stinker of the festival was unquestionably Johnny Depp’s, Modi´s Three Days in the Wing of Madness, a laboured and mirthless portrait of roguish bohemian artist Amedeo Modigliani, which played like a groaningly self-indulgent love letter to Depp himself. The reputation-battered actor-director did his messy second feature no favours by arriving late for press interviews, triggering a coordinated walk-out by journalists, part of a mass media mutiny over limited access to stars which began brewing in Cannes and Venice. If San Sebastián was intended to be part of Depp’s career-saving charm offensive, it proved far more offensive than charming.
Depp’s debauched debacle aside, this year was a good festival for comebacks. A special Jury Prize went to former Baywatch star Pamela Anderson for her revelatory performance in Gia Coppola’s heart-tugging indie drama The Last Showgirl. Riffing on her real public image in her meta-tinged role as a 57-year-old Las Vegas dancer facing the harsh rejection that comes with middle age, Anderson was honoured as part of an unusual full-cast award that also included co-stars Jamie Lee Curtis, Dave Bautista and more.
Another unlikely comeback kid was veteran British writer-director Mike Leigh. Defying a bizarre string of rejections from Cannes, Venice and Telluride, the 81-year old elder statesmen of contemporary social-realism made a punchy return to vintage heartbreaking form with the European premiere of his latest gritty drama, Hard Truths. Featuring a mostly black cast, this tragicomic London family portrait is powered by a wrenchingly emotional star performance by Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who previously worked with Leigh on Secrets and Lies (1996). Jean-Baptiste was a surefire candidate for Best Lead Performance prize in San Sebastián, but instead the jury chose a more delicate but equally devastating turn by Patricia López Arnaiz, playing a divorced mother struggling with grief and loss in Spanish director’s family tragedy Los Destellos (Glimmers).
Indeed, death and terminal illness were recurring themes across the festival program, from We Live In Time and Glimmers to the domestic premiere of local screen legend Pedro Almodóvar’s prize-winning assisted suicide drama The Room Next Door. The 91-year-old Greek cinema icon Costas-Gavras also turned his unflinching gaze on end-of-life care in his discursive series of medical case studies, Le Dernier Souffle (The Last Breath). And terminal cancer was a key plot thread of Chinese writer-director Xin Huo’s debut feature Bound in Heaven, a visually ravishing romantic thriller which won the festival’s main cinematography award and the critics-driven FIPRESCI prize.
San Sebastián is also known for its excellent retrospectives – in fact, it is one of the few major festivals in Europe to still do in-depth work in that regard. This year was no exception, with a deep dive into the political history of Italy in the second half of the 20th century. Italia Violenta dealt primarily with the social and political unrest of the 1960s and 1970s, showing a series of films shot or set in those years, alongside precursors like Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione (1943) and a couple of more contemporary films. The audience responded enthusiastically (every screening TFV attended was packed), enjoying a range of moods and styles, from stark Neorealism to the populist and highly entertaining poliziotteschi, particularly an Umberto Lenzi-directed double bill featuring Tomas Milian at his most villainous.
From a user-friendly media viewpoint, San Sebastián has always been in the forefront of those festivals that segued from Covid seating restrictions into a permanent pre-fest ticketing system for press and industry, as well as for public film-goers. While no one has yet devised a perfect system, the Spanish festival is now one of the most advanced in automatically uploading all tickets to festival badges, requiring only that the viewer know his or her seat number. Top marks is also due to the organisers for allowing press and industry guests to select seats for the entire festival a full week before screenings begin. After a hectic summer of overcrowded festivals with frantic crack-of-dawn booking deadlines, San Sebastián offered a smarter, smoother, more civilised alternative.
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