Spain’s San Sebastián Festival, the highest-profile movie event in the Spanish-speaking world, bowed yesterday to sunshine, Alicia Vikander’s enchanting smile and a film revolution.

Launched in 1953, San Sebastián has never perhaps taken place at a time of such radical change. And it is reflecting that, in the presence of OTT players’ films, its thoroughgoing makeover of its role as a film festival and the vision of key new films of the rebellion of the oung from Medellín to Florida to southernmost Chile, who are rising up against a powerless, inept or tyrannical establishment and forging their own destinies.

Both movies, plus San Sebastian’s multiple sections focusing entirely (New Directors) or largely (Horizontes Latinos) on new talent look vital. Most of San Sebastián movies are arthouse, whatever their crossover potential.

And maybe the biggest challenge of all facing arthouse cinema is how it connects with maturing millennials who prefer their sophisticated fiction served in high- end TV drama.

“In my opinion, film festivals are undergoing deep transformation,” says José Luis Rebordinos, San Sebastian director since 2011. The biggest events –Cannes, Berlin, enice– can still play the traditional role of hosting big movie world premieres. Others, however, such as San Sebastián, while still showcasing new films, will also have to “work other fields” becoming “ever more a year-round event,” he adds.

Already, San Sebastián co-organizes a six-week Ikusmira Berriak (New Prospects) project development residency. It´s five students, none over 33 –Spain’s Maider Fernández Iriarte and Samuel M. Delgado and Helena Girón, Argentina’s Julia Pesce and Belgium’s Leonardo van Dijl– pitch their titles at Sunday’s Europe-Latin American Co-production Forum.

Going one step further, the San Sebastian Festival will now back the new Elías Querejeta Film School which offers training in film festival programing and curation.“It doesn’t make sense to have a film school in San Sebastian unless it has an organic relation with what happens in San Sebastian, “says Rebordinos”. “In a groundbreaking novelty, the Festival’s around-15 students, having signed confidentiality agreements, will be made party to San Sebastián Festival meetings and its decision-making process, including why films are accepted or rejected”, he adds.

Hordes of teen or twenty-something spectators do flock to the San Sebastián Festival. The challenge is for cinema theaters to retain their interest for the remainder of the year. In any out-reach to new generations of spectators, San Sebastián can play a vital role. 2017 sees it celebrating its 65th edition. But it is in many ways, almost by definition, given its New Directors and Latin American Focus, one of the world’s youngest major-league film events. In 2016, nearly half (47%) of San Sebastian’s 17 competition entries were first features or made by directors under 40, vs. 9.5% of Cannes’ and 15% of the Venice Festival’s. This year round, though bookended by films from highly established figures such as Wim Wenders (Submergence) and Bjorn Runge (The Wife), eight of the 17 titles in Official Selection are still first features or made by directors who are 40-or- nder. In Vikander, who toplines Submergence, San Sebastian has brought one of the world’s youngest global stars. The oldest director in Horizontes Latinos, the festival’s choicely curated Latin American showcase, is Marcela Said, at 45. Its 13-title New Directors has only one filmmaker over 40 (Marialy Rivas, a superannuated 41).

San Sebastian underscores building trends in art house cinema which amp up its young adult appeal, such as the incorporation of genre elements. Daniel Palacios’ New Directors’ entry Underground is a family drama, but also, in its later stretches, an original corpse heist thriller; Princesita films the pubescent heroine’s sexual initiation and rape like Rosemary’s Baby -style fantasy horror; hugging close to its heroine in every shot, Killing Jesus plays like a vengeance thriller as she hits Medellín’s mean streets to befriend her father’s sicario assassin, and then shoot him in cold blood.

In one of the first signifIcant deals announced at San Sebastián, Latido ilms announced on the eve of the Festival that it has acted with Colombia’s 64-A Films to sell two upcoming movies from Carlos Moreno - Lost Wolves and Dogwashers - which turn his Dog Eat Dog into a trilogy of “tropical thrillers.”

Last year, a dozen or so San Sebastian titles, often from first feature directors, presented disparate visions of a disaffected, disenfranchised or simply disorientated youth.

Though San Sebastián’s 2017 titles range wider than in many past editions, a brace of titles side with teen protagonists now show them taking matters into their own hands, battling authority (Sollers Point), finally facing the root cause of their fractiousness (Life and Nothing More), confronting searing patriarchal abuse (Princesita), a passive police system (Killing Jesus) or the repression of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte’s troops as in The Sower, a delicate love story set from 1851 in a bucolic but oppressed hamlet high in the French hills. Rebellion does not guarantee success. It can certainly be, quite literally, explosive. But, as San Sebastián titles suggest, the gulf between an establishment and the young has never seemed wider. And there’s no doubt what side filmmakers are on.

John Hopewell