Activism and Allure: Official Selection Opposing Urges at the 73rd San Sebastian Film Festival

Palestinian flags held aloft by protesters lined the length of the red carpet leading into the sleek, prismatic cubes of the Kursaal Congress Centre, where a stream of celebrities, among them Pedro Almodóvar, Walter Salles, and Juliet Binoche, arrived for the opening gala of the 73rd San Sebastian Film Festival. The uneasy contradictions of entertainment-world glamour meeting with the urgent platforming of activist resistance – so often the domain of international film festivals, where cinema expands audience horizons as a potent reflector of the zeitgeist even as its industry can shrink inclusivity down to a cloistered bubble – take on particular nuances in the Basque Country. There, the region’s own fierce self-determination struggles underpin a gritty sincerity in the more political aspects of the programming of an event held in an upmarket coastal spot of urbanely attired dog-walkers and Michelin-starred eateries. 

In a city where it is scarcely possible to turn a corner in its maze of narrow streets without seeing a rectangle of the black, white and green tri-colour intersected with red hanging from windows and balconies, Gaza was the galvanising calamity, and many festivalgoers wore “Genozidioa Stop” (“Stop the Genocide,” in Basque) badges pinned to their clothing. This solidarity, far less contentious here than at many other European festivals, drove the festival’s main talking points. There were debates on docudrama ethics and award politics around Kaouther Ben Hania’s Sawt Hind Rajab (The Voice of Hind Rajab), about the Israeli Defense Force’s killing of a five-year-old Palestinian, which screened in the Perlak section for the year’s best feature films, hot off its Grand Jury Prize at Venice. In San Sebastian, it won the Audience Award, as well as the Euskadi Basque Country Agenda 2030 prize from the regional Basque government. Also widely discussed was the reference to Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide by American actress Jennifer Lawrence, who was in town to receive an honorary Donostia Award for her contribution to cinema, and who possesses star clout big enough to mitigate any likely Hollywood career fallout from her vocal stance.

Among the seventeen features in a very eclectic Official Selection competition, which my viewing was mainly concentrated on as a member of the FIPRESCI jury, local productions shone bright. The Basque feature Maspalomas, directed by Jose Mari Goenaga and Aitor Arregi, is relatively conventional in form, but with great humour and heart gives voice to the experience, little-explored on screen, of a seventy-something gay retiree. Vicente (Jose Ramon Soroiz, winner of the Silver Shell for Best Leading Performance) has enjoyed a pleasure-seeking lifestyle in Maspalomas, a Gran Canaria resort town, but when that is brought to an abrupt halt by health issues, he is forced to reevaluate his relationship to desire, himself and his significant others. Established director José Luis Guerín’s Historias del buen valle (Good Valley Stories) was also a pure delight, making the little space afforded to documentary in the Official Selection unforgettable. It honours both eccentric humour and grit in its beautifully textured portrait of Valbona, a suburban district of Barcelona, and the irreplaceable personalities shaping it over waves of migration. But the biggest revelation was Alauda Ruiz de Azúa’s Los domingos (Sundays), which deservedly came away with the top award, the Golden Shell For Best Film, the Basque Film award, and the FIPRESCI award from the critics’ jury. 

Sundays

With its family drama trappings and its coming-of-age focus on a teenage would-be nun, Sundays did not stand out on paper as anything out of the box but proved a delicious surprise, transcending its familiar framework to become an astutely sly, non-didactically ambiguous and complex portrait of disillusionment and faith in spirituality and love, as one family comes apart and reconfigures itself. Seventeen-year-old Catholic boarding school student Ainara (a captivating Blanca Soroa) decides she wants to enter a convent, blindsiding her family and friends, who are less than enthusiastic about her recently conceived plan. She is convinced that God has called her. While her widowed father Inaki (Miguel Garces) is skeptical but tentatively supportive, her cynical firecracker of an aunt Maite (Patricia Lopez Arnaiz, excellent) is convinced she is lost and in need of urgent intervention to prevent her grasping for anything that will fill the void her mother has left, even as her own unravelling marriage to the placid Pablo (Juan Minujin) upends her equilibrium. A prioress (Nagore Aranburu) eager to take Ainara under her wing, whose own level of trustworthiness is hard to pin down amid kindly solicitousness and flashes of something a shade more controlling, adds to the range of competing viewpoints in a drama that Ruiz de Azúa leaves open for viewers to interpret according to their own philosophical leanings. The film’s generous and humanistic refusal to make black-and-white ciphers of its characters is a rarity to be appreciated in an era of polarised stances and decreased dialogue, and its conclusion refuses to superficially wrap up its thorny divisions into a consolatory harmony. A choral rendition of Nick Cave’s song Into My Arms is the perfect accompaniment for this twisting search of doubt and conviction, departures and new roads.

A number of Official Selection films were uneven but original and intriguing affairs. A muddled tone made a missed opportunity of Belén, Dolores Fonzi’s chronicle of the hugely significant case of a lawyer who fought to save a client unjustly imprisoned for illegal abortion after a miscarriage in Argentina in 2014. Legal drama and the sober realities of oppression and awakening activism mix with flourishes of broad, brassy comedy that hit awkwardly for an international audience. Polish director Agnieszka Holland brought her characteristic love of subversive playfulness to Franz, an unconventional take on Franz Kafka’s life. The film rehumanises and rescues the Prague-born writer from the heaviness of his association with the nightmarish bureaucratic oppression he wrote about, and questions his current-day reduction into tourist merchandise, but loses much of his macabre bite in the process. Ungrateful Beings, Slovenian director Olmo Omerzu’s truly offbeat tale of a separated dad intent on proving to his ex that he can provide their two kids a happy Adriatic vacation, also vigorously shuns expectations. After anorexic daughter Klara (Dexter Franc) hooks up with local hoodlum Denis (Timon Sturbej), the plot takes wild turns, becoming more ingenious and audacious even as it loses credibility, blending family drama with blackly comical crime saga to show that selfish parents may just be the worst, best-hidden monsters on the loose.

James Vanderbilt’s Nuremberg, with Russell Crowe as captured German war criminal Hermann Goering, and Rami Malek as the psychiatrist that develops a strong fascination with him when tasked to assess him, was clunky, overlong, and somewhat cliched in its portrayal of the dangerously seductive allure of the Nazi regime, though its overt warnings of modern American fascism landed well with the crowd (boisterous audience reactions to political pointmaking was frequent at San Sebastian). Another star-powered title, headed for Netflix and woozily untethered to reality in a manner that was slickly, extravagantly diverting, was Edward Berger’s Ballad of a Small Player, a hallucinogenic reflection on the kind of spiritual emptiness that only grows with the sensation-seeking pursued to fill it. Set in a dizzying red and green neon nighttime wonderland of casino halls and high-end hotels in Macau, it stars Colin Farell as an unravelling con artist whose luck is down, with the drastic, life-or-death import that is inseparable from addiction. He teams up with a jaded loan shark (Dao Ming) who may or may not be an apparition, and is tailed by a gangly British private detective (Tilda Swinton, at her comically eccentric best). 

The Fence

A more rigorous examination of mercenary lost souls was Le Cri des Gardes (The Fence), the latest feature from French director Claire Denis. It received somewhat of a lukewarm reception when it premiered at Toronto, and continued to divide audiences in San Sebastian, but for my money it was the other big standout of the Official Selection beside Sundays. I’ve always leaned into imperfect films that are knotty and bold, and was not put off by the theatrical staginess of this chamber piece, which is an adaptation of Bernard Marie-Koltes’s 1979 play Black Battles With Dogs. It uses a language of broad-strokes artifice and archetypes that is less naturalistic than her similarly themed, unquestionably sensational 2009 White Material, but Denis has made The Fence sharp-edged and strange enough to grip from start to end. The stripped-back, spatially confined nature of the set-up creates a high-intensity laboratory for its explorations of power through encounters charged with threat and alienation, laying bare inequalities of gender and race, and the destructive void at the nexus of colonialism and global extractive capitalism.

The fence of the title is literal, cordonning off the gated and guarded living compound for the white men spearheading a construction project in an unnamed West African nation. Money and untouchability are their aims in this temporary live-to-work situation where they have zero concern for the needs, desires and wellbeing of the population, while they get rich quick by tapping resources. The large crates that function as their sleeping quarters have an almost sci-fi quality in their lack of domestic trappings. Family and community are concepts that do not need to be catered to by these structures instrumental only for profit – until site manager Horn (Matt Dillon) has his new wife Leonie (Mia McKenna-Bruce) flown in to reside there, and she’s plunged into anxious doubt over whether a fulfilling routine might be possible for her at this spartan outpost.

Lack of oversight on the power Horn and volatile engineer Cal (Tom Blyth) have accrued through white privilege has already enabled their worst instincts to run amok and sparked a crisis standoff. A local worker has been killed on the job, in what has been covered up as a “work accident,” and his smart-suited brother Alboury (Isaach de Bankole) has come for the body, refusing to leave his waiting vigil on the other side of the fence until it is delivered. His dignified insistence is a counterpoint to the devious machinations of an imported, corrupt system that is transactional and exploitative as it is untethered to ethical convictions or empathy. 

Leonie is the biggest question mark among these figures, her ambiguous and anomalous presence a lit match in a suspenseful tinderbox situation that seems certain to end badly – it just remains to be determined how, and for whom. She cuts an almost Lynchian, dreamlike figure standing in the desert-like isolation at night in impossibly impractical heels and a fire-red negligee dress, seductively potent but perilously vulnerable in an ultra-masculine zone of entitled greed where workers’ bodies have already been designated as disposable for use. She’s a vision of objectified fantasy, and an extension of Horn’s material clout, her invitation to join him having stemmed from an insurance pay-out, but Denis knowingly plays with and undercuts this, granting her enough resourceful chutzpah to cause a real upset to an existent power matrix already complicated by hints of a homoerotic backstory between Horn and Cal, in a shifting postcolonial noir that is a dark, operatic dance of culpability and transgression.

Two Pianos

The most surprising and idiosyncratic features of the Official Selection were mixed in among enjoyably diverting but more generic arthouse fare, chiefly a crop of visually chic French and Spanish-language offerings about elite-world creative types in emotional meltdown. Arnaud Desplechin’s Deux pianos (Two Pianos) is an unabashed exercise in the cliche of the tortured artist, as Francois Civil steps into existential angst and melodramatic excess as a self-destructive piano virtuoso (François Civil), who after a chance park encounter becomes obsessed with the child he believes he fathered from a steamy affair. In Alice Winocour’s fashion-world drama Couture, Angelina Jolie and Louis Garrel do what they can with a script geared toward puncturing the illusions of the beauty industry, with a breast cancer diagnosis and the workplace pressures and precarity of those employed over Paris Fashion Week as reality-check plot devices, but still the production cannot muster the emotional intensity or edge required, and falls back on glossy stylisation. Still, it had more of substance to say about suffering and self-actualisation than The Currents, from Argentinian director Milagros Mumenthaler, which was a little too intent on aestheticising psychological crisis in its vivid, dreamlike vision of a successful designer from Buenos Aires in a striking aquamarine overcoat who has an urge to drown herself after a Swiss awards reception. Of course, heartbreak and health struggles come for all status levels alike, and perhaps it was just not the time for these accounts of impassioned and tormented privilege to strike the nerve they otherwise might amid less catastrophic daily geopolitical headlines. At any rate, they balanced the section’s excitingly varied sweep with indulgent splashes of style.

San Sebastian Film Festival
19 – 27 September 2025
https://www.sansebastianfestival.com