Cate Blanchett in San Sebastian The Australian actress and producer Cate Blanchett received the first Donostia Award of the San Sebastian Festival's 72nd edition this evening at the gala in the Kursaal Centre, where she considered it an "honour" to receive the event's highest accolade and gave an imioned defence of the "desire to know". Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón, for whom Blanchett has just worked on the miniseries Disclaimer, presente...

                         Arnold, Audiard, Baker, Coppola, Courcol, Elliot, Fargeat, Kapadia, Rasoulof, Salles, Sangsoo, Schrader and Sorrentino to compete in San Sebastian Festival’s Perlak section ‘Marco’, by Jon Garaño and Aitor Arregi, will close the section, also to show ‘The Wild Robot’ and ‘Maria Callas: Letters and Memories’ out of competition https://youtu.be/NV9mhQyiSnc?s...

            Animales del desierto, by Santiago Loza; Crocodilla / She, Crocodile, by Gabriela Amaral Almeida; El espíritu de la ley / The Spirit of Law, by Natalia Meta; La escuela pesada / Hard-Boiled School, by Hernán Rosselli; La levedad de ella / Her Lightness, by Rosa María Rodríguez Pupo; La mujer extraña / The Strange Woman, by Martín...

Laura Mora’s film Los reyes del mundo / The Kings of the World, a Colombian co-production with Luxembourg, , Mexico and Norway, bagged the Golden Shell at San Sebastian Festival’s 70th edition.                                    The official jury also decided to honour Genki Kawamura with the Silver Shell for Best Director for Hyakka / A Hundred Flowers (Japan), while the ...

This year the Festival will be celebrating its 70th consecutive edition with the same enthusiasm felt the day it first saw the light on September 21st 1953. Conceived as an International Film Week for the purpose of  screening and marketing films, it was not long before the IFFPA granted it B status (non-competitive), thanks to the success of its first edition. A year later it was called the International Film Festival, and in 1955 the IFFPA recognised the festival as competitive, speciali...

 The Canadian director and screenwriter David Cronenberg (Toronto, 1943) will receive a Donostia Award at the 70th edition of the San Sebastian Festival, thereby recognising the career of one of the most unusual filmmakers to come out of the last 50 years with its highest honorary accolade. On 21 September the Victoria Eugenia Theatre will host the award ceremony followed by the screening of Crimes of the Future (2022), the feature film starring Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydo...

 Juliette Binoche, one of Europe’s most international actresses, will feature on the official poster of San Sebastian Festival’s 70th edition, to run from 16-24 September. Winner of an Academy Award for her work in The English Patient (Anthony Minghella, 1996), the French actor will visit the city for the fourth time to receive one of this year’s Donostia Awards in recognition of an extensive career which has seen her play almost 75 characters, from power-wield...

Today saw the presentation of the 63rd San Sebastian Festival, to take place from September 18 to 26. Its Director, José Luis Rebordinos, and two of the Management Committee, Maialen Beloki and Joxean Fernández, announced its contents, the composition of certain juries and the names of those who will attend this new edition. The actress Emily Watson will receive the Donostia Award in recognition of her career on September 25. Other outstanding actors will also ...

                                   This year, the Sebastiane Award celebrates its 16th year at the San Sebastian Festival; sixteen years of endeavouring to present its award to the production that best reflects the realities, freedoms and social progress made by LGBTI people.  This collective and its particularities have remained hidden for years in both society and cinema. Today awards such ...

                                                         Savage Cinema presents its largest and most diverse selection of titles to date. In this year’s line-up, the section announces six movies and two shorts, including the first Spanish production in the section and state of the art films about sports such as kayaking, car racing and climbing....

                                                Today the selection of films in the New Directors section was announced. The Director of the San Sebastian Festival, José Luis Rebordinos, together with Ander Aizpurua Kutxabank´s Wholesale Banking Director, revealed the titles of the thirteen films to compete for the Kutxabank-New Directors Award, decided b...

Relatos Salvajes (Wild Tales), reached 1.108.804 spectators within 2 weeks from its release becoming one the biggest opening in Argentina. Relatos Salvajes (Wild Tales) is a 2014 Hispano-Argentine black comedy-drama film written and directed by Damián Szifrón and starring an ensemble cast consisting of Ricardo Darín, Óscar Martínez, Leonardo Sbaraglia, Érica Rivas, Rita Cortese, Julieta Zylberberg and Darío Grandinetti. Featuring six different ...

            The beautiful film telling the story of this English teacher who travels Spain ti meet John Lenon at a set in Almería and ask him to add lyrics to his LP´s. Based on a true story written and directed by David Trueba who won this 2 Goya Awards(Best Director and Best screenplay). Javier Cámara won his first Goya for Best Actor for the portrait of this teacher and Natalia de Molina won hers as a New Actress.  The sixth Goya was to ...

The 61st edition of the San Sebastian Festival will come to a close on September 28 with the world premiere of The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet. The film is the latest work from the French moviemaker, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, creator of one of the great classics of contemporary cinema, Amelie (2001), and helmer of titles such as Delicatessen (1991), La cité des enfants perdus (The City of Lost Children, 1995) – both in collaboration with Marc Caro – Alien Resurrection (1...

This second edition of the Forum will run for 3 days-23, 24 and 25 September- to coincide with Films in Progress, dates on which San Sebastian will celebrate an enormous coming together between of the audiovisual industry. 16 projects in development from 15 countries will participate in the II Forum. The 16 projects have been selected from among the total of 160 submitted from 24 countries, mostly in Latin America. The Selection Committee made specific mention of the high standard of ...

The Director of the San Sebastian Festival, José Luis Rebordinos, has presented, with Iñigo Arteche, Director of Assessment and Consultancy at IKERTALDE, the economic impact study carried out on the Festival by the company. Among the data and conclusions of the study are: The San Sebastian Festival is an SME (small and medium enterprise) with a team of 642 people during the event. A 12-month calculation of the time worked by these people shows that the Festival is a stable orga...

  The "Horizontes Latinos" programmes at the 60th edition of the San Sebastian Festival includes the works of twelve filmmakers from Argentina, Mexico, Chile, Brazil, Uruguay and Colombia. A selection of films to have competed or been presented at important international festivals, but which have not yet been screened at a Spanish festival or commercially released in our country. The latest work by Carlos Reygadas, one of the best known Mexican filmmakers on the international...

When you take any sort of writing class, one of the first things you learn is narrative structure: not just beginning, middle, end, but the specific way that stories need to be formed in order to seem as though they're moving forward. The more you study it, the more it haunts you, until half the time you're watching movies, you start pointing out specific points in time that serve a purpose to move the story forward. While I understand narrative structure and why it's important, I fin...

  The sun is back in San Sebastian, which means that, for those inclined, a trip to the beach between films is more than possible: the Kursaal is right on the Zurriola beach in Gros, and there are surfers and swimmers out every day (even days that aren't sunny and bright!) ...

Blind faith is a very strange sort of thing. On the one hand, blind faith can help a person to achieve things that never would have otherwise been possible. On the other hand, blind faith can bring a person to do things that they never would have done. Hadewijch is a French film in the official selection at the San Sebastian Film Festival, and it is a film that explores this very idea. It follows the life of Céline, a French girl so enamored with God and her religion that she i...

“That movie was absolutely French.” The man next to me couldn't have been more right: at the end of Making Plans for Léna, I could feel the collective “what the...” that tends to through people's heads at the end of a particularly “French” movie. But what makes a movie seem French? It's not the language or even the location: there are hundreds of movies that were set in , made in , in French with French actors and French directors that don't c...

In San Sebastian, the Kursal, the buzzing center of the festival, lights up the entrance to Gros and the beach. - Emily Monaco ...

When writing reviews for film festival movies, there are a few adjectives I've learned I will probably drop from my vocabulary: heart-warming, light, sweet... They're good adjectives for other movies, to be sure, (if a bit overused at times), but they have no place here. Nope. No way. So when I saw Yo, También, I wasn't exactly sure how I planned to describe it, for that is what it is: heart-warming, light and sweet. It made me (and the rest of the audience) burst out laughing at...

  The rain from this weekend has let up, but the weather here in San Sebastian is still cloudy. Fingers crossed that the sunny day they promised us for Thursday will arrive! Until then, everyone here is walking the red carpet with an umbrella in one hand, just in case. At least the carpet isn't covered in plastic anymore, like it was this weekend. ...

Some films just make me feel stupid. I generally am not a fan of this. 20 minutes into This is Love, I still had no real idea what was going on, or even who the main character was supposed to be. I spent a lot of time trying to figure it out… was the director going to pull a “Bruce Willis was dead the whole time!” on me? How did these two characters connect? What in God’s name was going on? Let me backtrack a moment: This is Love is a German film that begins by intro...