Today the Academia de las Artes y las Ciencias Cinematográficas hosted the announcement of 18 titles with Spanish production (15 features, two shorts and one TV series) that will be seen in the Official Selection, New Directors, Zabaltegi-Tabakalera, Perlak and the Velodrome at San Sebastian Festival’s 70th edition, running from September 16-24.
Fernando Franco (Seville, 1976) returns to San Sebastian’s official competition with his third feature, La consagración de la primavera / The Rite of Spring, following the Silver Shell received by Marian Álvarez for La herida / The Wound (2013) and having been selected as special screening with Morir / Dying (2017). La consagración de la primavera follows the meeting between an 18-year-old girl (Valèria Sorolla) and a young boy with cerebral palsy (Telmo Irureta).
Suro is the feature directorial debut from Mikel Gurrea (San Sebastian, 1985) after his short film Heltzear premiered last year at Venice Festival and programmed in Zabaltegi-Tabakalera. Starring Vicky Luengo and Pol López as a couple who move to the countryside, Suro is the first project from the Ikusmira Berriak residencies to compete for the Golden Shell.
La maternal is the second movie from Pilar Palomero (Zaragoza, 1980) after winning the Goya for best film, best new director and best original screenplay for her debut feature, Las niñas (Schoolgirls, Made in Spain, 2020, after having been screened in Berlin and Málaga). Palomero focuses on a 14-year-old teenager (Carla Quílez) in her process of learning how to become a mother.
Jaime Rosales (Barcelona, 1970) also returns to San Sebastian’s official competition after Tiro en la cabeza / Bullet in the Head (2008), having bagged the Fipresci Prize and presenting several of his films in Made in Spain and Perlak (Petra, 2018). In Girasoles silvestres / Wild Flowers, Anna Castillo plays a mother in search of a better life.
A Spanish production will be one of the Official Selection special screenings: El sostre groc, a non-fiction directed by Isabel Coixet (Barcelona, 1962) about the sexual abuse committed in Lleida’s Theatre School between 2001 and 2008. San Sebastian was the setting for Coixet’s directorial debut, with Demasiado viejo para morir joven (New Directors, 1988).
The Movistar Plus+ series Apagón / Offworld will participate out of competition coming with five episodes directed by Rodrigo Sorogoyen, Raúl Arévalo,Isa Campo, Alberto Rodríguez and Isaki Lacuesta, taking a solar storm that causes a global blackout as its starting point.
Alberto Rodríguez will also present the Festival’s opening movie in San Sebastian, the previously-announced Modelo 77 / Prison 77.
Maria Elorza, in New Directors
The New Directors section, dedicated to first and second movies, will include Maria Elorza’s A los libros y a las mujeres canto / To Books and Women I Sing. Elorza (Vitoria-Gasteiz, 1988), whose first shorts, when she belonged to Las Chicas de Pasaik group, Gure Hormek / Our Walls ( Zabaltegi-Tabakalera, 2016), and La chica de la luz (Velodrome, 2016) premiered at San Sebastian. She also wrote the multi-award winning shorts Ancora Lucciole (2018) and Quebrantos / Breaches (2020), and will present her first feature at the Festival, composed around an anonymous and unarmed legion of women who take care of books.
Elena López Riera, Lur Olaizola, Carlota Pereda and Estibaliz Urresola, in Zabaltegi-Tabakalera
The Zabaltegi-Tabakalera section will host the presentation of another project coming from the Ikusmira Berriak residencies, Elena López Riera’s El agua / The Water, a film selected for the last Cannes Directors’ Fortnight. The programme also includes Carlota Pereda’s debut, Cerdita / Piggy, which had its premiere at the Sundance Festival. Also featuring in the section are two shorts from the Kimuak programme: Lur Olaizola’s Hirugarren koadernoa / Third Notebook, participating out of competition following its premiere at Cinéma du Réel, and Cuerdas / Chords, by Estibaliz Urresola, which will show following its screening at the Semaine de la Critique in Cannes.
Isaki Lacuesta, Oriol Paulo and Rodrigo Sorogoyen, in Perlak
The Perlak section will include Isaki Lacuesta’s Un año, una noche / One Year, One Night, a contender at the Berlinale, and Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s As Bestas / The Beasts), following its premiere at the Festival de Cannes. Both compete for the City of Donostia / San Sebastian Audience Award.
Out of competition we also have the Special Screening of Los renglones torcidos de Dios / God’s Crooked Lines, an adaptation of the homonymous novel by Torcuato Luca de Tena, signed by Oriol Paulo and starring Bárbara Lennie and Eduard Fernández.
Paco León, Fernando León de Aranoa and Fermin Muguruza, at the Velodrome
The Velodrome theatre with its screen of 400 metres for almost 3,000 spectators will host the premieres of Rainbow, Paco León’s take on the classic The Wizard of Oz, with Dora Postigo, Carmen Maura and Carmen Machi; Sintiéndolo mucho / Feeling It, Fernando León de Aranoa’s documentary on songwriter Joaquín Sabina; and Fermin Muguruza’s latest animated movie, Black is Beltza II: Ainhoa, whose first part closed Zinemira in 2018.
OFFICIAL SELECTION - In competition
Julia, a 22-year-old mother of two, falls in love with Óscar, a troubled boy with whom she embarks on a love affair. The more time they spend together, the more Julia asks herself if Óscar is the person she really needs by her side, prompting her to set out on a personal journey to find happiness for herself and for her family.
Laura has just arrived in Madrid to study at University. One night, she accidentally meets David, who has cerebral palsy. The relationship with the boy and his mother will give Laura the push she needs to overcome her complexes and insecurities and confidently enter a new phase. A story about that vital moment when anything is possible and how the most unexpected encounters can change our lives.
At the age of 14, Carla is a wild and rebellious teenager. Living in a modest restaurant on the outskirts of a town with her young single mother, she skips school and passes the time with her friend Efraín. When a social worker realizes that Carla is five months pregnant, she is taken to ‘La Maternal’, a center for teenage mothers, to live with other young women like herself. Together with their babies, they will learn to cope with this new adult life for which they had no time to prepare.
Helena and Ivan decide to make a new life for themselves amongst cork trees, but their different points of view on how to live on the land surface, challenging their future as a couple.
OFFICIAL SELECTION - Not in competition
A solar storm hits the Earth, causing a widespread blackout. In this new reality, five stories unfold, focusing on characters who struggle to adapt to a world without electricity, telecommunications or means of transport, where they are forced to face up to their most primal needs, instincts and fears.
Modelo Prison. Barcelona, 1977. Manuel, a young accountant, imprisoned and awaiting trial for embezzlement, faces a sentence of 6 to 8 years, a disproportionate punishment for the crime committed. Together with his cellmate Pino, he joins forces with COPEL, a collective fighting for the rights of ordinary prisoners and amnesty. A war for freedom breaks out that will bring the Spanish prison system to its knees. If things are changing outside, they’ll have to do the same inside. A tale of friendship, solidarity and freedom, inspired in true events.
OFFICIAL SELECTION - Special Screenings
In 2018, a group of nine women filed a complaint against two of their teachers at Lleida’s Theatre School for sexual abuse carried out between 2001 and 2008, when they were teenagers. It was too late. Due to fear, embarrassment, because they took so long to understand and digest what had happened, the complaint arrived when the statute of limitations had expired and the case had been closed. What they didn’t know is that, despite the statute of limitations having expired, their statements were opening a new door where, perhaps, all was not lost.
NEW DIRECTORS
A woman was almost called Avioneta (Small Airplane) at birth. Another had a library in the back seat of her car. Yet another fractured her finger with the rebel shelves of her bookcase. Lectors read to cigar makers while they work. Women remember poems while they iron. And to them all I sing. Standing against fire, water, moths, dust, ignorance and fanaticism, an anonymous female army looks after books. An intimate resistance, lacking epic events, revolution or weapons.
ZABALTEGI-TABAKALERA
During the stifling Extremaduran summer, a mysterious stranger comes to Sara’s town and kidnaps the girls who ruthlessly tease her every day. And she sees the whole thing. Only Sara can save the girls, but should she do it?
Rita belongs to a women’s choir on the point of breaking up because they have lost the municipal grant that allowed them to pay the rental on their rehearsal room. Now the group has to decide whether or not to accept sponsorship from one of the companies responsible for causing most pollution in the valley.
It’s summer in a small village in south-eastern Spain. A storm threatens to cause the river running through it to overflow yet again. According to popular belief, a number of women have the “water inside” and are predestined to disappear with each new flood. Ana lives with her mother and her grandmother in a house eyed with suspicion by the other locals. In this electric atmosphere preceding the rain, Ana meets José as she struggles to banish her ghosts.
An actress and a filmmaker rehearse a movie script. The screenplay includes excerpts from the diary written by María Dolores González Katarain, Yoyes, during her exile in Mexico between 1980 and 1985, after having left ETA. As the script progresses, hints and references to other women appear amongst Yoyes’s words: Ulrike Meinhof, Simone de Beauvoir, Rocío Díazescobar, Alexandra Kollontai, Tina Modotti. Meanwhile, outside it grows darker.
PERLAK
Alice, a private investigator, checks into a psychiatric hospital feigning paranoia with the goal of collecting evidence for the case she is working on: the death of an inmate in unclear circumstances. But the reality she faces in her confinement will exceed her expectations and cast doubt on her own sanity. An unknown and exciting world will open before her eyes. The course of events will see her morph from investigator into suspect in a masterful whodunnit, where nothing is what it seems.
French couple Antoine and Olga moved to a little village in the Galician countryside some time ago. There they live a quiet life, although their relations with the locals is not as idyllic as they would like them to be. A conflict with their neighbours, the Anta brothers, will see tension rise in the village to the point of no return.
Ramón and Céline are a young couple who happen to be at the Bataclan in Paris on the night of 13 November 2015. While the terrorist attack is unfolding, they each find their way into the musicians’ dressing room, where they take shelter. On leaving they are no longer the same. And they don’t know if they ever will be again…
VELODROME
Ainhoa was born by a miracle in La Paz (Bolivia), after the death of her mother Amanda in a simulated car accident. She grew up in Cuba and in 1988, at the age of 21, she traveled to the Basque Country to discover the land of her father Manex. In the midst of repression and political conflict, she meets Josune, a committed journalist, and her gang of friends. After one of them dies of a heroin overdose, Ainhoa and Josune set out on an initiatory journey that will take them across Lebanon, Afghanistan and the city of Marseille. These are the last years of the Cold War and they will delve into the dark world of drug trafficking networks and their close links to political plots.
Dora is a teenager with an extraordinary talent for music and boundless energy difficult to keep in check. After a huge fight with her father on her birthday, Dora leaves home with her dog Totó and sets out on a journey to find the mother she has never met, having disappeared when she was a baby. On the way she makes new friends who join her on a road trip to Capital City; but she also has to deal with dangerous enemies who will try at all costs to prevent her from discovering the mystery of her past. But Dora’s vitality and magic will help her to reach not only the end of her journey, but the start of another one.
A portrait of Joaquín Sabina without his bowler hat, made only inches from his skin, nocturnal and calculated, by his friend, the moviemaker Fernando León de Aranoa. A story like his voice, hoarse, direct and unadorned, narrating with no extenuating circumstances the intimacy of the artist, his behind the scenes, his B side. Which starts when he comes down off the stage, which accompanies him in his everyday life, and in his unexpected moments: in the laughs and in the drama. Sintiéndolo mucho is the result of thirteen years of filming together, and it travels to all of Joaquín Sabina’s stages, public and private, in and out of the spotlight. A walk through the keys of his life and his work: of what moves him, of what inspires him, of what hurts him, always developed on the basis of lively, shared situations between the musician and the moviemaker.