San Sebastian Film Festival Awards Presented

The Golden Shell, the main award of the San Sebastian festival, was awarded to the Spanish film Ergot by Hayon Camborda. This is an unexpected, although in its own way logical, choice of the jury, whose other decisions turned out to be predictable. Comments on the results of the festival Andrey Plakhov.

The jury of the main competition was headed by the Frenchwoman Claire Denis, and also included the German Christian Petzold – two authoritative figures of European cinema. The list of awards did not include the film “MMXX” by the most famous Romanian contestant Cristi Puiu – a pretentious opus of four short stories, played against the backdrop of the coronavirus pandemic. Quite rightly, the Silver Shell prize for best director went to a female director duo from Taiwan. Young debutantes Peng Qihui and Wang Pingwen presented Journey into Spring, a powerful drama about old age, loneliness, repentance and the unquenchable search for the meaning of life.

Numerous films on the topic of family abuse and sexual crimes remained without awards.

An exception is the Danish-Swedish “Kalak” by Isabella Eklöf, where this theme is also present, but it is counterbalanced by the mesmerizing landscapes and rituals of Greenland. Nadeem Carlsen, who shot them, was awarded for best cinematography; The film was also awarded the second-ranking Special Jury Prize.

Another film, the Argentine Puan, received two prizes at once. He was noted for the script by Maria Alche and Benjamin Naystant, as well as for the acting work of Marcelo Subiotto, who played the philosophy professor – absurd and funny in everyday life, but who showed himself worthy in an emergency situation. This prize was shared with Subiotto by the Japanese veteran Tatsuya Fuji, who, by an amazing coincidence, in the film “The Great Absence” also played the role of a university professor who only fell into dementia in his declining years.

In San Sebastian, acting awards are no longer differentiated based on gender, but are given for the main role and separately for the supporting role. The latter went to Hovik Keuchkerian this year, a Spanish actor with Armenian roots, who created a somewhat caricatured image of a village hermit and a passionate lover rolled into one in Isabel Coixet’s film “Love.”

Only men were on the acting podium. Perhaps this was compensation for the women’s win in other categories – and above all in the main one.

Women’s triumph became at the same time a Spanish triumph. The fact that the Spaniards won the Golden Shell is not a sensation in itself: Spanish films have won here thirteen times, but their directors have always been men. Meanwhile, for the last four years, the main award of the festival has been taken away by women. Camborda became the fifth – and the first Spanish woman. And the first whose award-winning film Ergot was filmed in Galician. In addition, she is a native of San Sebastian, so all the components came together in this victory.

The name (sometimes translated as “Rye Horn”) refers to a genus of fungus that grows in cereals; it is an alkaloid with hallucinogenic properties, a kind of “herb of oblivion.” The heroine of the film, which takes place at the end of Francoism in the early 1970s, lives in a Galician village, earning money by collecting shellfish and helping local women give birth. It also helps to perform abortions, which were prohibited at that time, for which ergot is used. The film contains plenty of harsh naturalistic scenes and contains themes that are popular in feminist discourse. This is, first of all, the situation related to illegal abortions and which has given rise to many successful films in recent years: the Romanian “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” won at Cannes, the French “The Event” – in Venice, and now “Ergot” – in San Francisco. Sebastians. This is also a theme of female solidarity opposing the male totalitarian world.

The award given to Ergot was far from the only one for the festival hosts, who were recognized in many parallel and non-competitive programs.

And the especially prized Public Prize, as expected, went to the film “Society of Snow” by Juan Antonio Bayona, nominated by Spain for the Oscars. The film reconstructs the 1972 crash of a Uruguayan plane, whose passengers struggled for survival for 72 days on the snowy slopes of the Andes. It really impresses with its most complex mountain photography, and with its spiritual, psychological, and purely physiological collisions that arise in extreme situations between life and death.

And critics, represented by the FIPRESCI jury, awarded their prize to the film “Nails” by the Greek Christos Nikou – a fantastic story about attempts to scientifically measure the “substance of love” and about how life resists this rational approach.