San Sebastian 2026: The Verdict

The curtain rang down on the 74^th San Sebastian International Film Festival (Sept. 18-26) on Saturday night with a satisfying, well-measured distribution of awards chosen from a particularly rich and diversified selection of films. It left a tangible legacy to round out the final year of popular festival director José Luis Rebordinos, who after a 16-year tenure will pass the reins to Maialen Beloki at the end of 2026. Beloki, the unanimous choice of the festival’s executive board, is well-equipped for the job, having served as deputy director of San Sebastian since 2016. The only whisper of concern at the festival, which is one of Spain’s most important cultural institutions, is insuring the continuance of the government financing it needs to maintain its high standards and ambitions.

And it has stiff competition abroad to take into account. Coming close on the heels of Venice and overlapping the end of Toronto, the Basque event (known locally as Donostia Zinemaldia) has had to carve out a distinctive identity to keep itself relevant for press, industry and audiences awash in new films. A haven for Spanish films and filmmakers, it has never over-obsessed with the red carpet, although Hollywood knows it well. Brad Pitt was in town to support Heart of the Beast alongside Orlando Bloom, who gave Werner Herzog a Donostia Award, which Naomi Watts also received.

Most of the attention, however, is directed at the films, screened all around town to sold-out houses. Fortunately San Sebastian, like Venice, uses the most modern online booking system that allow press and industry to upload their tickets directly to their badges, resulting in a huge saving in time and anxiety at the theater door. And despite some inevitable crossovers of titles with Toronto and Venice, the selection held its head up. Notably, the return of English master Mike Leigh (after the love showered on Hard Truths two years ago) was rewarded by the jury with multiple prizes. He competed with what may possibly be his last film, Tender Loving Care, taking home not only the top Golden Shell Award but best screenplay for Leigh and best leading performance for Kate O’Flynn, in the role of a frustrated social worker whose loving family undergoes a major crisis.

The rich program confirmed this has been a banner year both for home-grown Spanish films and gay-themed stories. A big noise in both categories was La Bola Negra, making its domestic debut to packed houses ahead of theatrical release, which won the festival’s Audience Award. Co-directed by Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, Spain’s official Oscar submission weaves an operatic blend of fact and fiction around the legacy of literary icon and LGBT martyr Federico Garcia Lorca, who was murdered by Francoist fascists 90 years ago. Other stand-out queer stories in the program included Club Kid, New York comedian Jordan Firstman’s hilarious portrait of a gay party promoter adjusting to unexpected fatherhood, and Jane Schoenbrun’s stylish meta-horror trans allegory Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, which won the Zabaltegi-Tabakalera prize. All three titles arrived in San Sebastian propelled by buzzy momentum on the festival circuit.

The Nordic selection was, as usual, very strong, and the jury acknowledged this with three prizes: Amanda Kernell won Best Director for her Sámi coming-of-age story Brace Your Heart, cementing her status as one of the pre-eminent filmmakers dealing with the northernmost communities of the region; and Hans Petter Moland’s Growth of the Soil, already chosen to represent Norway in the International Feature Film category at the Oscars, gained additional kudos with the awards for Best Cinematography to Oskar Dahlsbakken and for Asta Kamma August’s powerful leading performance. Denmark also made a strong show for itself in New Directors with the blisteringly great pedophile drama Cute.

The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer won the Horizontes Latinos prize for its director, the photographer Alessandra Sanguinetti, who playfully followed two rural Argentinean women over the course of 30 years. With its specialized content and distinctive Latin American personality, Horizontes Latinos is nowadays much more than a festival sidebar. A well-curated selection, not focused on world or even European premieres, its films often earned 15-minute ovations not heard in other sections. Diego Luna, presenting his migration drama Ashes, said Horizontes Latinos is a way to show the world not just the cinema but the unity of Latin America. Market synergy is found in The Coproduction Forum, a pioneer of its kind, providing production or distribution support to some of the films of this section.

After Venice opened with Ink (also screened here as the customary Surprise Film), San Sebastián picked the Belgian period piece Le Faux Soir as its closing event. It falls into the current festival trend of programming movies that highlight the role of the press in shaping society, be it with the rise of increasingly salacious news items in Danny Boyle’s film or the opposition to Nazi occupation in Michaël R. Roskam’s fact-based account of how the Belgian resistance movement created a bootleg version of the leading national daily paper, to share their own side of things with the public.

Finally, the José Giovanni retrospective was a triumph, with multiple sold-out screenings for a program shining a light on a controversial but key figure in French post-war cinema, a writer-director whose past life as a convicted criminal shaped his worldview and vision of cinema. (Not surprisingly, most of his oeuvre paints gangsters and thieves in a sympathetic light). Ironically, for someone whose work frequently dealt with second chances, it’s unlikely such a retrospective will happen in France anytime soon, due to Giovanni’s status as a Nazi collaborator.

Though the harrowing world political situation seemed less in the spotlight than it has been at other fests this year, a significant number of award winners made urgent statements on stage demanding freedom for Gaza, which received applause  from the audience.  Showing that sentiments ran high, Naza, the searing documentary by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor in which anonymous Israeli soldiers describe the military killing machine in Gaza, won the Audience Award for Best European Film.