73rd San Sebastian Festival - 19/27 September 2025
73SSIFF - 19/27 September 2025
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Z365" or "Festival all year round" is the new strategic point of the Festival in which converge investigation, accompaniment and development of new talents (Ikusmira Berriak, Nest); training and cinematic knowledge transfer (Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola, Zinemaldia + Plus, Filmmakers' dialogue); and investigation, disclosure and cinematic thought (Z70 project, Thought and Discussion and Research and publications).
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Festival Diary
BINIEZ, OSORIO, RONDÓN AT
FILMS IN PROGRESS
Monday, September 19th, 2016
Adrián Biniez’s anticipated The Waves, A Great Dragon, Jaime Osorio’s follow-up to El Páramo, and first-time Venezuelan director Gustavo Rondón’s La familia are three of the six titles at this year’s San Sebastián Films in Progress pix-in-post competition.
Also in the mix: Álvaro Aponte-Centeno’s Silence of the Wind, Santiago Esteves’ Rey’s Educationand Alexandra Latishev Salazar’s Medea.
A twice-a-year competition, taking place in March at the Toulouse Cinelatino Rencontres and at September’s San Sebastián, Films in Progress runs Sept. 19-21, parallel to San Sebastián’s Europe-Latin America Co-Production Forum, the Spanish fest’s other big industry event.
The Waves, the third feature from Biniez, and a co-production between Uruguay’s Mutante Cine and Germany’s Pandora Film Produktion, turns on a Montevideo messenger, in his mid-thirties, who goes to a beach, dives into the sea and ends up on other beaches in other summers of his youth, revisiting the friends, relations and loves whose summers together have shaped his life.
Produced by Diana Bustamante at Colombia’s Burning Blue in co-production with Dynamo, producer of The Hidden Face, and the line-producer on Narcos, A Great Dragon is directed by Osorio, whose acclaimed debut El Páramo, a social-issue genre film, was energetically sold by Wild Bunch. It continues Osorio’s examination of man’s warped-vision inner violence in the
tale of park warden battling - in his own eyes at least - to suppress his inner monster.
Set up at Venezuela’s La Pandilla, the feature debut of Gustavo Rondón is co-produced by Venezuelan companies Películas Prescindibles and Factor RH Producciones and Norway’s Dag Hoel Filmprduksjon, having won a $51,000 award by the Norwegian South Film Fund.
Also backed by France’s Amiens Festival Screenplay Development Fund, the Caracas-set e Family follows Andrés, a 35-year-old father, and his 12-year-old son Pedro who fl ee their the working district after the son accidentally kills a young thief.
Silence of the Wind, teaming Puerto Rico’s Quenepa Producciones with France’s Promenade Films and the Dominican Republic’s Balsie Guanabana Macuto, tells the story of a fisherman who takes over the family business, human traffi cking, when his sister is murdered.
First conceived as an eight-seg TV mini-series that won a fiction contest at Argentina’s Television Digital Abierta, cop thriller-drama Rey’s Education focuses on the relationship between a 14-year-old boy, Reynaldo Galíndez, Rey, and a retired security guard.
The feature film of Costa Rican distaff helmer Alexandra Latishev Salazar, produced by director-producer Paz Fábrega, whose Cold Seawater won a Rotterdam Tiger Award in 2010, Medeaaddresses issues such as pregnancy and parents-daughter relationship, chronicling the life of a 25-year-old university student girl.
A must-attend gathering for the Latin American fi lm industry, Films in Progress attracts a large number of sales agents, led by a substantial French contingent who seeks to multi-task at San Sebastián, checking out new titles at Films in Progress, taking meetings with producers from its Co-Production Forum and gaining profi le for their Toronto Festival titles.
San Sebastián 2016’s Films in Progress frames a higher number of lesser-known directors than in some past editions, but select filmmakers at the section sometimes go on to almost immediate celebrity such as Guatemalan Jayro Bustamante, whose feature Ixcanul was acquired at 2014’s San Sebastián by Vicente Canales’ Film Factory. It subsequently won the Silver Bear Alfred Bauer prize at the 2015 Berlinale and sold over all the world.
Aponte-Centeno presented Silence of the Wind in the Europe-Latin America Co-Production Forum. It would not be too much of a surprise if next year or so, it made the Horizontes Latinos cut. More and more, directors or titles are returning to San Sebastián to present new
titles, or the same title at different phases of its development-to-production cycle.
An example: Adrián Biniez brought Gigante to Horizontes Latinos in 2009.
Four titles presented last year’s Films in Progress at San Sebastián now screen completed at Horizontes Latinos. One is a world premiere: Era O Hotel Cambridge ( The Cambridge Squatter) by Eliane Caff é. Another, El Amparo (aka Sobrevivientes), by
Rober Calzadilla, is almost one, having just opened the 27th AFI Latin America Festival on Sept. 15 in Silver Spring, Maryland.
Others have had illustrious big fest careers as San Sebastián generates titles or Sundance, Berlin and Cannes. Acquired by Latido Films at 2015’s Films in Progress, Rara by Chile’s
Pepa San Martín, played the Berlinale, winning its Generation Kplus International Jury Grand Prix. Also from Chile, Much Ado about Nothing, Alejandro Fernández Almendras’
caustic social rights-of-passage drama, played the World Cinema Dramatic Competition at Sundance and segued to Berlin’s Panorama.
Hailed by Venice director Alberto Barbara as “the big discovery” of this year’s event, Christopher Murray’s The Blind Christ, seen in rough cut at this year’s Toulouse Films in Progress, screened in competition at Venice and now unspools at San Sebastián, again in Horizontes Latinos.
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