San Sebastian, the major film festival in the Spanish-speaking world, celebrated its 70th anniversary this year with a strong selection that cast a spotlight on original new films from Latin America and Argentina in particular. The jury’s choice to award the Golden Shell for best film to Kings of the World (Los reyes del mundo), a Colombian coprod with Europe, further confirmed what a magnet the festival has become for the top Latin American offerings.
Unfolding in one of the most beautiful coastal cities in the Basque Country, the Donostia Zinemaldia, as the festival is called in Basque, drew full-capacity audiences at all its numerous venues from Sept. 16 to 24. And yet, the Covid-era ticketing system, which uploads tickets to accredited attendees’ badges (as Venice used to do) without requiring smart phone verification, worked perfectly, relieving fest-goers of needless stress and anxiety and allowing them to concentrate on the important thing: the films on the screen. A round of applause to the organizers and to their attitude of friendly partnership with the press.
Which is not to say that it was all smooth sailing for festival director José Luis Rebordinos, who came under scrutiny for refusing to cancel the screenings of two films that had been bumped from the Toronto line-up the previous week, both on the strength of accusations of misconduct on the set while the films were shooting. One of these regarded the competition film Sparta by revered Austrian director Ulrich Seidl, a master at recounting the bleak meaninglessness of ordinary lives and the sexual exploitation that underlies them. TIFF pulled the much-anticipated film after the German magazine Der Spiegel published an investigation into the film shoot in Romania, alleging that child actors aged 9 to 16 were exposed to alcoholism, nudity and violence during filming and that their parents were not made aware that the film was about pedophilia.
The second film removed from TIFF was Pornomelancholia starring Mexican “sex-influencer” and porn star Lalo Santos; it too screened in competition at San Sebastian, where its director Manuel Abramovich, who was also D.P., won the jury prize for best cinematography. Toronto’s withdrawal occurred after Santos claimed the docu-fiction hit too close to home and said the filming conditions had affected his mental health.
Neither Seidl nor Lalo Santos attended the festival. In a message thanking the organizers for showing Sparta, Seidl said he wanted the film to speak for itself without overshadowing it with his presence. (Overall reviews of the film were quite positive, in fact.) But even without the director’s presence, Rebordinos stuck to his guns, insisting that San Sebastian programs its films on the basis of their quality, and he can have no direct knowledge of what happened on film sets. Having ridden out the storm last year over giving the embattled Johnny Depp the Donostia Award for his career, he met with journalists over coffee to clearly explain that he would never cancel a confirmed screening without a court order demanding he do so.
Curiously, this year’s Donostia Awards were presented to iconic French star Juliette Binoche and to Canadian director David Cronenberg, who was defined by his friend Viggo Mortensen as a living legend. In his acceptance speech Cronenberg, whose most recent film is Crimes of the Future, lauded the subversive, disruptive, dangerous nature of art. “Now more than ever there’s a need for the crime of art,” said the director. Certainly the time is ripe for a discussion of how festivals choose to showcase or exclude films and personalties that come with grave but unproven accusations and other uncomfortable baggage, and Rebordinos pledged that the dialogue, in the form of public debate, would continue at next year’s event.
In addition to Pornomelancholia, another Argentinean-led coproduction that got attention was The Substitute (El Suplente) directed by Diego Lerman. The teenage actress Renata Lerman, who vivaciously played the rebellious daughter of an idealistic teacher struggling to teach marginalized kids, won the Silver Shell for best supporting performance.
The big Latin American win as best film, The Kings of the World, marks the third straight year that a woman director has won San Sebastian’s most coveted award. Laura Mora depicts the harrowing odyssey of a group of violent urban street boys who travel deep into the country’s virgin forests to claim a farmhouse one of them has inherited. The realism of their deprived lives creatively clashes with their fantasies that a better future is out there, somewhere.
Though the Asian selection didn’t shine much this year, two films convinced the jury. The Japanese Alzheimers’ drama A Hundred Flowers (Hyakka) gradually leaves cliché behind as director Genki Kawamura explores the difficult relationship of an aging mother and her adult son, winning the best director award. The Chinese film A Woman (Kong Xiu) is the adaptation of an autobiographical and openly patriotic novel by Zhang Xiu Zhen set during the Cultural Revolution. Somewhat surprisingly, it won the best screenplay nod for writers Dong Yun Zhou and Wang Chao. A more offbeat recommendation from Asia would be the Japanese tale The Zen Diary, about an old writer and former monk living by himself in pristine nature, where he eats off the land and gets entangled in other people’s lives despite himself. It was a standout in the Culinary Cinema sidebar.
Best leading performances were presented ex-aequo to two very promising teenage actors, the French Paul Kircher in Winter Boy (Le lycéen) and the Spanish Carla Quilez in Maternal. The fresh-faced Kircher, starring opposite Juliette Binoche in Christophe Honoré’s novelistic drama about a gay boy who suddenly loses his father, is charming, disarming and multi-layered. Quilez is extraordinarily vivid as a 14-year-old from the wrong side of the tracks who has a baby in a home for teenage mothers, where she finds the support to turn her life around.
Other winners included American director Marian Mathias’s Runner, set against the empty landscapes of the American Midwest. This minimalist coming-of-age drama with strong visual aesthetics and emotional force won the Special Jury Prize. Competing for Spain was first-time director Mikel Gurrea with Suro. It is the story of a young couple of architects who move to a country farmhouse where their relationship starts to disintegrate, and took home the Irizar Basque Film Award.
The festival opened on the memorably strident note of the Spanish film Prison 77 (Modelo 77), in which director Alberto Rodriguez grippingly dramatized the historic prison riots that signaled Spain’s transition to democracy in the post-Franco years. The closing night film left audiences with the light, entertaining flavor of Neil Jordan’s revisitation of Raymond Chandler’s beloved hard-boiled detective in Marlowe. A nice change of pace for a festival that had its fair share of bleak realism – and an apt celebration of the Irish-born star appearing in his 100th film, Liam Neeson.