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San Sebastián: What to know about Spain’s biggest film festival

The San Sebastián International Film Festival, the most prestigious of its kind in Spain, kicks off on Friday September 20th. Here are 10 fascinating anecdotes and pieces of information that will help you understand its importance to Spanish culture.

Published: 19 September 2024 17:23 CEST
San Sebastián: What to know about Spain's biggest film festival
The 72nd San Sebastian Festival will honour Cate Blanchett with a lifetime achievement award. (Photo by Alberto PIZZOLI / AFP)

The Local counts down ten essential facts about the most important film festival in the Spanish-speaking world, as it gets underway in the Basque seaside city.

1. The San Sebastián International Film Festival (Festival Internacional de cine de San Sebastián in Spanish and Donostia Zinemaldia in Basque) was founded in 1953. Although it was originally intended to honour Spanish language films, it soon allowed international films to compete and since 1955 has attracted the great and the good of world cinema.

2. The film festival was started by a group of San Sebastián businessmen and Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, perhaps surprisingly, immediately gave it his blessing. He saw the festival as an opportunity to present Spain as a more open and friendly country on the international stage.

Spanish dictator Francisco Franco repressed the Basque culture and language, but he allowed the San Sebastían festival to become international. (Photo by AFP)

3. This year’s festival – the 72nd – will take place between Friday September 20th and Saturday September 29th at the Kursaal Congress Centre and Auditorium on San Sebastián’s seafront, designed by Spanish architect, Rafael Moneo. It’s an impressive building, especially when lit up at night!

4. It is one of only 15 category ‘A’ film festivals accredited by the FIAPF (International Federation of Film Producers Associations) alongside such other illustrious film festivals as Venice, Cannes and Berlin.

5. Some of cinema’s most classic moments were brought to the screen for the very first time at San Sebastián. It hosted the international premiere of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, an event attended by the iconic film director himself, as well as the film’s star, James Stewart.

Alfred Hitchcock in 1972 in Cannes, one of Europe’s other big film festivals. (Photo by AFP)

6. Berlin has its Bear and Cannes its Palme, so what is the prize doled out at San Sebastián? Quite aptly for this seaside city, it is the Shell of course! The Golden Shell (Concha de Oro) is awarded to the best film of the festival, while the best actor and actress receive a Silver Shell.

US actor and director James Franco holds the “Concha de Oro” (Golden Shell) best film award for the film “The Disaster artist” in 2017. (Photo by ANDER GILLENEA / AFP)

7. While San Sebastián is not one of the most headline-grabbing events on the film festival calendar, it has attracted quite a few cinematic icons in its time. Elizabeth Taylor, Audrey Hepburn, Meryl Streep, Robert de Niro and Brad Pitt have all attended – among many others.

Brad Pitt and Quentin Tarantino during the presentation of “Inglorious Basterds” at the San Sebastián International Film Festival in 2009. (Photo by RAFA RIVAS / AFP)

8. The festival’s lifetime achievement award is the Donostia award, given every year to honour one more more actors for their work. In 2008, living legend Meryl Streep won alongside arguably the world’s most famous Spanish actor, Antonio Banderas. This year, Spain’s most iconic film director Pedro Almodóvar and Australian actress Cate Blanchett will receive the lifetime award.

9. In 1989 Bette Davis, one of the most classic stars from Hollywood’s golden age came to the festival to receive the lifetime achievement award. It would be her last ever public appearance, she died two weeks later.

10. At this years edition, many big Hollywood names are expected, including Pamela Anderson, Javier Bardem, Monica Bellucci, Jamie Campbell Bower, Johnny Depp, Andrew Garfield, Isabelle Huppert , Noémie Merlant, Ángela Molina, Franco Nero, Lupita Nyong’o, Charlotte Rampling, Will Sharpe and Tilda Swinton.

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CULTURE

Pedro Almodóvar: chronicler of modern Spain crowned in Venice

Born during the dark days of dictatorship, Pedro Almodóvar -- awarded the top prize at the Venice Film Festival on Saturday -- chronicled in vivid colour the reopening of Spanish society, and has come to embody his country's cinema.

Published: 8 September 2024 08:42 CEST
Pedro Almodóvar: chronicler of modern Spain crowned in Venice

Ironically, it was the director’s first feature-length film in English, “The Room Next Door”, that won him the Golden Lion, even if he had received a career award from Venice in 2019.

“The Room Next Door” sees regular Almodóvar collaborator Tilda Swinton as a war correspondent suffering from terminal cancer, with Julianne Moore as her friend who stays with her in the final days.

“It is my first movie in English but the spirit is Spanish,” Almodóvar said after receiving the award, where he made an appeal for dying with dignity to be a “fundamental right”.

Long synonymous with subversive stories that mixed humour, transgression and lots of drugs and sex, Almodóvar’s works are increasingly tormented by physical decline and the fear of death.

To explain this new seriousness, the 74-year-old often evokes his life as an ageing man, living increasingly as a recluse with his cat.

Almodóvar burst onto the international scene with his 1988 Oscar-nominated “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown”, a dark kitschy comedy about a woman who had just been dumped by her lover and whose apartment becomes the scene of hostage situations and accidental overdoses.

Once asked about the “masochism, homosexuality, masturbation, drugs, porn and attacks against religion” that seemed to characterise his films, he replied: “All of these themes that are considered taboo belong to my life.

“I don’t consider them to be prohibited or scandalous,” the director added.

READ ALSO: 17 hilarious Spanish translations of famous English movie titles 

But for more than a decade, Almodóvar has been embracing a more poignant tone in his work.

His “Pain and Glory” from 2019 featured Antonio Banderas playing an ailing director that the filmmaker has acknowledged was modelled on himself.

Mother as muse

One of the leaders of the “Movida”, the explosion of creativity that followed the death of long-time Spanish dictator Francisco Franco in 1975, Almodóvar is openly gay.

He soon became a symbol and chronicler of a modern and tolerant Spain that he also helped create.

Born in 1949 in the arid region of La Mancha in the centre of Spain, he rarely talks about his father, who died in 1980.

But he grew up in the company of women and his mother has been a key reference throughout his life, with maternity a recurring theme of his movies, particularly in his 1999 masterpiece, “All About My Mother”.

“My passion for colour is a response to my mother who spent so many years in mourning and blackness that goes against nature,” he once said.

His debut feature film, the 1980 camp comedy “Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls Like Mom”, captured the newfound cultural and sexual freedom of the time.

He was one of the first directors to include transgender characters in his movies, including in “All About My Mother”, which won the Oscar for best foreign language film.

He won a second Oscar for best original screenplay for his 2002 film “Talk To Her”.

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