From Hitchcock to Alaska – Kommersant newspaper No. 172 (7373) of 09/17/2022

The 70th Anniversary Film Festival has opened in San Sebastian. It introduces its history and program for this year Andrey Plakhov.

At one time, Deborah Kerr and Audrey Hepburn, Federico Fellini and Orson Welles, Elizabeth Taylor and Luis Buñuel became the guests of honor of the festival in San Sebastian. In 1958, Alfred Hitchcock was hosted here with Vertigo. The film received the second most important award – “Silver Shell”, but it was also the biggest festival success of “Vertigo”. In 1958, the film was nominated for only two minor Oscar nominations, but in 2012 it was recognized by critics as the best in the history of world cinema. In Hitchcock’s biography, two prizes received in San Sebastian almost exhaust his festival prize collection.

Here, sometimes at the end of their careers, living legends appeared. The divine Bette Davis, with a cigarette in her mouthpiece, went on stage to present the prize to Andrei Konchalovsky for the film Homer and Eddie, and a few days later died in Paris of lung cancer. There was also a dark period in the history of the festival when it lost its A category and real influence. But in post-Franco Spain it came alive again, thanks in large part to Basque nationalism. Indeed, for political demarches, an international film festival with stars is an ideal place. Once at the opening, I presented the FIPRESCI prize for the best film of the year to Pedro Almodovar. Behind the scenes, Antonio Banderas was waiting for his release with his then wife Melanie Griffith and her mother Tippi Hedren, the legendary heroine of Hitchcock’s The Birds. At this time, there was a noise in the hall, someone shouted about the bomb. Griffith got nervous, Banderas began to calm her down: they say, in his passionate homeland, it’s just customary to be naughty like that. Griffith’s mother and Banderas’s mother-in-law, Hitchcock’s horror school “ice blonde” Tippi Hedren, behaved most imperturbably.

Guests and laureates of the festival in different years were Francis Coppola, George Lucas, Claude Chabrol, Roman Polanski, Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert. Every year, the Donostia honorary award is presented here for an outstanding contribution to cinema. This year’s recipients of the award will be Juliette Binoche and David Cronenberg. Hanna Shigulla, Penelope Cruz, Liam Neeson and other stars expressed their desire to take part in the anniversary festival.

In the competition program, the films of the Korean Hong Sang-soo “Climb Up”, the Argentinean Manuel Abramovich’s “Pornomelancholia”, the Frenchman Christophe Honore’s “Winter Boy”, the Austrian Ulrich Seidl’s “Sparta” attract attention. A scandal is associated with the last picture: the German magazine Der Spiegel accused its director of misconduct and exploitation of children. The hero of Sparta, an Austrian judo teacher in Romania, is a non-offending pedophile. Just hours before the screening, the Toronto Film Festival canceled the film’s world premiere. However, in San Sebastian, they did not follow the public campaign and said they did not intend to block the screening of the film, since the director was not charged legally. In doing so, the festival proved true to the line it showed a year ago by awarding the Donostia Award to Johnny Depp, a decision that caused a flurry of attacks in the Hollywood press.

Other programs of the festival will show films by Briton Peter Strickland’s “Empty Narcissus”, Korean Lee Chang Don’s “Heartbeat”, French Francois Ozon’s “Peter von Kant”, American Olivia Wilde’s “Don’t Worry, Darling”, Belgians Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s “Tory and Lokita, Swede Ruben Östlund’s The Triangle of Sorrow.

The program “New Directors” attracts special attention. It will show the film “Grand Marine” (“Lily and the Sea”), the feature-length debut of the Russian-French actress Dinara Drukarova. The film is based on the novel by Catherine Poulin. The main character, played by Drukarova herself, in order not to go crazy in the dullness and routine of a small town, runs away to Alaska – to the ocean, almost to the end of the world, to fish. There she is faced not only with a harsh life and cruel nature, but also with moral dilemmas. The film was made in co-production of France, Russia, Belgium and Iceland.