San Sebastian Film Festival ::

Per Fly

Danimarka

115 min.

Christoffer belongs to the fourth generation of the family owning the renowned Borch Møller steel works, but has abandoned the family business in favour of a restaurant in Stockholm. Here he is happily married to a Swedish actress, Maria; but when his father commits suicide, Christoffer's mother demands that he come home to take over as managing director of the company. Reluctantly, he returns to take charge of the family dynasty. This comes as a surprise to his wife, his sister Benedikte, and her husband Ulrik, who was otherwise considered the most obvious candidate for the position. Christoffer is forced to use drastic measures to save the company from the threat of ruin, and this puts him on edge with the family and Maria. The inheritance comes with a personal price that he has to pay in full.

Dans le rouge du couchant / Red Dusk

Edgardo Cozarinsky

Frantzia - Espainia

90 min.

Michel, son of a Frenchman, but born on the other side of the world, arrives in Paris to start anew with a masterpiece inherited from his father as his only capital. Clara, a middle-aged woman wholly dedicated to her work, receives from the other side of the world a super-8 film which revives her memories of betrayal, setting her off in search of the culprit, who lives under another identity, behind another face, with the intention of killing him. Lastly, David, a once-well known artist turned forger, decides to ruin the plans of the dealers for whom he works in exchange for finding his former love lost on the other side of the world. This ?other side of the world? floating over the present lives of these three characters is no other than Buenos Aires, a city which has marked them in the past and which now brings them together in Paris.

El espíritu de la colmena / The Spirit of the Beehive

Víctor Erice

Espainia

97 min.

This beautiful poetical and political fable captivated at the 1973 San Sebastian Festival, at which it won the Golden Shell for Best Film. Since then, El espíritu de la colmena has formed part, with capital letters, of Spanish cinema's best history. Subsequently presented at the Chicago, London, Melbourne, Paris, Cannes, Los Angeles, New York, Mexico, Turin and Calcutta festivals, among others, it has received countless eulogies from the critics: ?A movie full of distant looks, of poetic unities?,?Evocative of Zurbarán, from whom we have learned to cinematographically describe the adventure of light?, ?An ascetic film, to be seen more than once?, ?A sociopolitical parabole skilfully woven into a specific Spanish reality?, ?One of the best films about childhood, possibly the prettiest to have been filmed in a Spanish landscape, and a surprising essay on the ability of cinema to endow mystery upon real life?, ?It acquires a masterly value opening doors through which we can also pass?... We are once again proud to show this masterpiece in a restored version.

Not in competition

El misterio Galíndez / The Galíndez File

Gerardo Herrero

Espainia - Erresuma Batua - Italia - Portugal - Kuba - Frantzia

126 min.

Towards the end of the 80s, an American woman named Muriel arrives in Spain to work on her doctoral thesis on Jesús Galíndez, a Basque politician exiled in the USA after the Spanish Civil War who disappeared in strange circumstances in 1956. Muriel contacts an elderly writer who sets her on the trail of the last people to have seen Galíndez alive. This is the outset of an investigation soon to adopt a political rather than an academic angle, given that the people responsible for Galíndez' death do everything they can to try and stop Muriel from putting two and two together and reporting her findings.

Not in competition

En la ciudad / In the City

Cesc Gay

Espainia

110 min.

The secret, intimate relationship between two people who live a series of sentimental experiences they don't talk about. Repressed desires and feelings, just like those kept hidden inside each and every one of us, until one day, without asking us for permission, they escape.

Girl With a Pearl Earring

Peter Webber

Erresuma Batua

91 min.

Delft, Holland, 1665. Young Griet becomes a maid in the house of Johannes Vermeer. He, recognizing Griet's intuitive understanding of colour and light, slowly draws her into the mysterious world of his painting. Maria Thins, Vermeer's mother-in-law, seeing that Griet inspires Vermeer, decides to allow their clandestine relationship in the hope that her son-in-law will increase his meagre output. Though unsure of his feelings for her, Griet falls increasingly under Vermeer's spell. Finally, the Machiavellian Van Ruijven, sensing the intimacy between master and maid, gleefully contrives a commission for Vermeer to paint Griet alone. The result will be one of the greatest paintings ever created, but at what cost to Griet?

Grimm

Alex van Warmerdam

Herbehereak

105 min.

With Grimm, van Warmerdam travels from the cold, misty northern woods of his native country to the sunnier, yet still dark, vistas of Spain in telling a post-modern fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel gone awry. But this time around it's Jacob and his sister, Marie, who are abandoned in the woods by their family. In his coat, Jacob finds a note from his mother urging them to find their uncle in Spain, but when they arrive, they learn that he has died. Marie expediently falls in love with and marries Diego, a rich surgeon, while Jacob jealously tries to tear his sister away. Together they learn that all is not what it seems in sunny Spain and that the loving groom and his sister have their own plans for them.

Histoire de Marie et Julien / The Story of Marie and Julien

Jacques Rivette

Frantzia - Italia

145 min.

40-year-old Julien, a clockmaker with destructive impulses, decides to blackmail Madame X, a rich, attractive woman who traffics in stolen antiques. What he doesn't know is that she has an even more dangerous secret leading to Marie, with whom he had fallen in love the year previously and who has made a mysterious reappearance. An enigmatic girl, despite their increasingly intensifying love, Marie seems incapable of physical feeling. Julien, who has rediscovered his love for life, is ready to crack the mystery and help Marie to free herself. Together they go as far as a man and woman can go, to a place where questions of life and death, hope and fear, no longer exist. A place ruled by love without limits.

Noviembre / November

Achero Mañas

Espainia

104 min.

Shut down the theatres, the performance has hit the streets! Impelled by a spirit which still preserves a patina of idealism, Alfredo arrives in Madrid intent on creating ?a performance which is freer, straight from the heart, capable of making people feel alive?. His concept of what acting should be begins beyond the stage, out in the streets face to face with the public. Outdoors, in any town square, in a park or in the city's most commercial street, Alfredo and his troupe November start the show: demons to provoke passers-by, displays of social conscience, actions taken to the extreme to put the forces of law and order on full alert. There are no limits, no censorship; only ideas which are always valid so long as the public ceases to be public and becomes part of show swept by surprise, fear, tears or laughter. Theatre as life, life as theatre... there is no longer any difference.

O caminho das nuvens / The Middle of the World

Vicente Amorim

Brasil - Argentina

85 min.

The movie is based on the true story of an illiterate, unemployed truck driver who, with his wife Rose and his five children, pedals from Paraiba in the poverty-stricken Northeast of Brazil, all the way to Rio de Janeiro looking for a job. Travelling on four bikes, the family knows solidarity and indifference, aggressiveness and cordiality. In spite of their love, Romão and Rose also have to deal with the tensions that rise among themselves and the coming-of-age of their eldest son, Antônio. The film is a 2,000-mile odyssey through the hinterlands of Brazil all the way to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil's best-known postcard, and, for Romão, the Promised Land.

Ojos que no ven / What the Eye Doesn't See

Francisco Lombardi

Peru - Espainia

149 min.

Two inmates in a public hospital, Don Victor and Don Lucho, argue constantly; Rodolfo, the judge's aid and Eva, a young girl who dreams of nothing but becoming a technocumbia star; Martín Chauca and Manuel Pareja, ex-agents trying to hide their past; Gonzalo, a handsome and successful TV host, looks on as generalized corruption is discovered; the passion unleashed by Mercedes, Don Victor's adolescent granddaughter, in Arturo Peñaflor, a dubious lawyer who manipulates the strings of the law; and, finally, Elena, wife of the forensic scientist in charge of investigating the traces of a mysterious mass murder, observed in turn by Colonel Hector Revoredo. Six stories set around the moment when the ?Vladi-videos? were discovered, containing images of the presidential advisor Vladimiro Montesinos bribing highly-placed officials, and which brought about Fujimori's fall from power.

Closing Film

Open Range

Kevin Costner

AEB

140 min.

Charley Waite, Boss Spearman, ?Button? and Mose Harrison try to shake their pasts freegrazing their cattle across the vast prairies where the only laws are dictated by nature. Closely linked by the Far West Code (to stand up for justice, to be loyal to those at your side), the cowboys do everything they can to avoid using violence. But their visit to a border town governed by corruption and tyranny changes their lives as they are obliged to take action. Amidst the turmoil, the loner Charley meets the merry, spirited Sue Barlow, who embraces his heart.

Not in competition

Sa-lin-eui chu-eok (Memories of Murder)

Bong Joon-ho

South Korea

127 min.

Gyunggi Province, South Korea, 1986. The body of a young girl is found brutally raped and murdered. Two months later, a series of rapes and murders commences under similar circumstances. And in a country that had never known such crimes, the dark whispers about a serial murderer grow louder. A special task force is set up in the area, with a local detective, Park Doo-man joined by a detective from Seoul who requested to be assigned to the case, Seo Tae-yoon. However, the solution to the murders grows fainter and drives the detectives to ever greater despair. The film is based on a true story.

Schussangst / Gun-Shy

Dito Tsintsadze

Alemania

102 min.

Lukas is doing his year of civil service, delivering meals on wheels to the old and the sick. He has no friends and spends most of his time alone, rowing by night on the river running through town. Meeting Isabella, the melancholic but fascinating girl of his dreams, he falls madly in love, making his only goal to protect and look after her. But pressure mounts in Lukas' world as he is investigated by Johannsen, a police officer, who has him under suspicion after a theft at the boat house. Lukas, the pacifist who refused to join the army, buys a rifle. No longer the person he used to be, when Isabella starts to distance herself from him, he becomes more and more confused and doesn't know how to deal with it all.

Opening Film

Suite Habana / Suite Havana

Fernando Pérez

Espainia - Kuba

84 min.

Havana, today, is a point of reference for many, a mystery for others, and a dream packed with contradictions and contrasts for those who love or criticize it. But Havana is not only one single space, one sound, one light; Havana is its people. And Suite Habana is a day in the lives of a few ordinary ?habaneros?. There are no interviews, no dialogues, no narrations; only images, sounds and music to cinematographically express the day to day business of a peculiar and unique reality. Each character represents the curious diversity of the social groups moving in the city... because there is not only one Havana: there are several invisible and different kinds of Havana lives.

SuperTex

Jan Schütte

Alemania - Herbehereak

95 min.

Max Breslauer, attractive, vital and in his mid-thirties, is the elder son of Simon Breslauer, a Jewish war survivor who has established a textile empire in the Netherlands. Strict yet loving, Simon values traditions such as the obligatory family dinner on Shabbat. Max is having problems finding his own way, always overshadowed by the figure of his omnipresent father, whom for that very same reason he has kept at a distance since adolescence. However, a series of events (he hits an orthodox Jewish boy with his car on Shabbat, a mysterious young woman appears claiming to be his father's mistress, his girlfriend leaves for Israel, his father falls into a coma following an accident) force Max to question his own identity and finally accept his father's legacy.

Te doy mis ojos / Take My Eyes

Icíar Bollaín

Espainia

116 min.

One winter's night, a woman, Pilar, flees from her house with nothing but a couple of belongings and her son Juan. Antonio is soon hot on their heels. As far as he is concerned, Pilar is his sun, she has, as he likes to say, ?given him his eyes?... As the movie unfolds, the characters rewrite this family who's who, identifying each person and stating what's expected of them, but where the entries are all mixed up, where it says home it means hell, where it says love there's pain and where the person promising protection causes terror.

The Station Agent

Tom McCarthy

AEB

88 min.

Finbar McBride wants to be left alone, but at four foot five, fading into the crowd is an almost impossible task. Born with dwarfism, Fin has responded to the unsolicited attention that his condition attracts by choosing a life of separation, alone with his one passion: trains. He takes up residence in an abandoned train depot in rural New Jersey, but much like the station agents that occupied small town depots before him, Fin finds himself, however reluctantly, enmeshed in the lives of his neighbours. Olivia Harris is an artist struggling with the recent death of her young son and the subsequent breakup of her marriage. The hot dog stand next door is run by Joe Oramas, with a talent for cooking and an insatiable hunger for conversation. This mismatched threesome forge an unlikely bond, which ultimately reveals that even isolation is better shared.

Veronica Guerin

Joel Schumacher

AEB - Erresuma Batua - Irlanda

96 min.

In the mid-90s, Dublin could have been compared to a war zone with, while only a few, extremely powerful drug lords who fought to gain control of the city. Their worst rival wasn't the police, but the courageous journalist Veronica Guerin, who worked tirelessly to unveil information about this dangerous situation. As she investigated and uncovered the names of the traffickers, she was painfully torn between her family duties and her responsibility to her readers and her country. She therefore became a national heroine for the Irish people. Attempts to end her life made her even more of a myth. Her brutal murder in 1996 led to a profound revamp of Irish legislation and to imprisonment of the most dangerous delinquents in the country.

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