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If you love something, let it go, the adage advises, and maybe it will come back to you. Maybe, however, it will go and go and go and never come back, and that, so Yeşim Ustaoğlu’s increasingly lyrical and persuasive “What Remains” would have it, might be its own sort of reclamation. The slowly built, […]
Macabre and melancholy but suffused with a delicious absurdism that somehow doesn’t clog the arteries of its hopeful little heart, Pablo Larraín’s sprawling, peculiar, terrific “My Sad Dead” is about 20 things at once in every moment. It’s a ghost story, obviously, on account of all the ghosts. It’s a droll tragicomedy, with eccentrically deadpan […]
“Tender Loving Care,” the latest and purportedly last film by veteran British writer-director Mike Leigh, was allegedly turned down for a Competition slot at the Venice Film Festival — but it had the last laugh at San Sebastián, ruling the Spanish festival’s awards ceremony with three prizes in the main competition, including the Golden Shell […]
Since hitting an artistic peak with the back-to-back festival triumphs “Head-On” and “Edge of Heaven” in the mid-2000s, German-Turkish auteur Fatih Akin has darted all over the map in genre, style and form — occasionally striking commercially, as with the Diane Kruger thriller “In the Fade” and the local hip-hop biopic “Rhinegold,” without ever matching […]
The depiction of schizophrenia on screen — especially in horror movies — has largely seen the mental health condition linked to violent and unpredictable rages, showing people when something has gone horribly wrong. This “misrepresentation,” according to British filmmaker Billy Lumby (a BAFTA nominee for his short film “Samuel-613”), was part of the inspiration behind his […]
SAN SEBASTIÁN, Spain — Finland’s Gaussian Scout (formerly listed Virtual Location Scouting) and Spain’s Pixentinel claimed the top prizes at the 2026 Zinemaldia Startup Challenge, the San Sebastián Festival’s flagship technology competition. Gaussian Scout, a browser-based virtual location scouting platform being developed by Finnish cinematographer Antti Ahokoivu, won Best European Project with its €10,000 and […]
SAN SEBASTIAN, Spain – Paco Rabal worked with Luis Buñuel, Michelangelo Antonioni and Carlos Saura, made more than 200 films and built a career spanning Spain, France, Italy and Mexico. In “200 Lives, Paco Rabal,” the Spanish screen legend gets one more role: Narrator of his own life. Directed by Vanesa Benítez, the documentary world […]
The premise of Argentina’s Ricardo Darin’s latest feature, “Therapy Done Right” (Lo dejamos acá”), world premiering at the San Sebastian Festival, is deceptively simple: A pragmatic psychoanalyst loses faith in conventional methods and starts pushing the boundaries with his patients. Everything seems to be going well until a writer (played by Diego Peretti), struggling with […]
For director Mikel Gurrea’s latest he didn’t have to travel far in search of a story. “I live in Barcelona’s district of Sants and, having done my previous film in the woods, this time I wanted to find fiction at my doorstep,” Gurrea told Variety of “Saints,” picked up for international by M-Appeal. “So I […]
For those of us who only ever think about reindeer when December draws in, and even then in a fairly abstract sense, “Brace Your Heart” arrives as a flinty reality check. Following the life and trials of a young female reindeer herder in the present day, it’s stripped of any fairytale essence, and doesn’t stint […]
This year’s back-to-back phenomenon of “Obsession” and “Backrooms,” two low-budget horrors that have now earned in excess of $900 million globally, sparked a predictable frenzy in the industry as producers and studios began looking for the next YouTube genre stars ready to make the leap to feature film. But for a group of sales execs […]
U.S. films will soon be the minority among the nominees for the top Academy Award, claims one of South America’s most successful producers. Rodrigo Teixeira, who through his RT Films banner has produced the likes of “Frances Ha,” “Call Me by Your Name,” “Ad Astra” “Bergman Island” and “I’m Still Here,” building up long-standing relationships […]
There was some much overdue optimism on the first day of the Creative Investors’ Conference, co-organized by CAA Media Finance, in San Sebastian on Tuesday, as execs from an established U.S indie distributor and new market entrant both celebrated the record breaking figures from the summer box office. “I think it’s a recovery and I […]
The Basque Country has become an increasingly attractive place to make films and television. In Bizkaia alone, audiovisual employment rose 50.5% between 2014 and 2024, while the number of companies linked to the sector climbed from 284 to 448. In 2025, the Bilbao Bizkaia Film Commission supported 219 shoots with an estimated economic impact of […]
