“The Boy and the Bird” by Hayao Miyazaki will open the festival in San Sebastian

The 71st International Film Festival opens today in San Sebastian. The main competition features 16 films, including new works by Cristi Puiu, Isabel Coixet, Martin Rechtman and Robin Campillo. The debut film by Russian Ili Malakhova, “Hello, Mom,” is participating in the “New Directors” competition. Comments Andrey Plakhov.

One of Europe’s oldest and most prestigious festivals loves to remember its history – the iconic directors and actors who visited San Sebastian during the golden era of cinema, from Orson Welles to Quentin Tarantino, from Audrey Hepburn and Bette Davis to Gregory Peck and Meryl Streep. Every year the honorary Donostia Award is awarded here for outstanding contributions to cinema. The list of its laureates is impressive: Max von Sydow and Gregory Peck, Robert De Niro and Warren Beatty, Catherine Deneuve and Isabelle Huppert, Johnny Depp and Juliette Binoche, David Cronenberg and Agnès Varda, Woody Allen and Hirokazu Kore-eda. Among them is Claire Denis, who heads the international jury of the big competition this year.

Alfred Hitchcock’s visit became legendary in its time: his psychothriller “Vertigo”, later recognized by critics as the best film of all time, was awarded in San Sebastian – although not the main prize, the “Golden Shell”, but the “Silver Shell”, yes and then shared it with the Italian painting by Mario Monicelli. Actor James Stewart, who plays Hitchcock, was also forced to share the prize he won for his male role with Kirk Douglas. These awards almost exhaust Vertigo’s prize collection.

But the history of the festival also includes cases when the jury showed enviable foresight: in 1969, it awarded victory to the film of the young director Francis Coppola “Rain People”, and in 1990 – the film “Miller’s Crossing” by Joel and Ethan Coen, also at that time aspiring filmmakers. The first female director to participate in the festival’s competition and receive an award was Yulia Solntseva, the widow of Alexander Dovzhenko: her film “The Enchanted Desna” was presented here in 1965. It was in San Sebastian that such now famous directors as Jonathan Glazer, Ryusuke Hamaguchi and Aki Kaurismaki first became competitors.

The latter this year will be awarded at the opening of the festival with the FIPRESCI prize, an international film critic who recognized the outstanding Finnish director as the best film of the year, “Fallen Leaves.” And after the opening ceremony they will show the beautiful Hayao Miyazaki’s painting “The Boy and the Bird”. For the second time in its history, the festival will open with an animated film, and for the third time an animated film is participating in the competition: “Sultana’s Dream” by Isabel Herguera, a native of San Sebastian. This is a fantastic story about the search for a utopian land of women lost somewhere in India.

The fact that the festival takes place in the Basque Country plays an increasingly prominent role every year. Supporting Basque and Spanish-language cinema is one of San Sebastian’s priorities. The history of the festival includes such major figures of national cinema as Luis Buñuel and Pedro Almodovar, Antonio Banderas and Penelope Cruz. And in recent years, the official program often cannot do without the participation of a film created by Basque filmmakers. One of them, Victor Erice, will be awarded this year with the Donostia Prize.

But as important as regional goals are, San Sebastian’s main goal is to present world-class cinema while discovering new talent from around the world and encouraging radical causes. This is noticeable in the competition program, where for the first time a film by a major Romanian director Cristi Puiu will participate: it is called “MMMX”. Among other competition films, attention is drawn to “Nails” by the Greek Christos Nikou, “Red Island” by the Frenchman of Moroccan origin Robin Campillo, and “Practice” by the Argentinean Martin Rechtman. Another question is how well the expectations will be met, because well-known names sometimes deceive.

You can certainly expect interesting impressions from the New Directors competition. The Russian film “Hello, Mom” by Ili Malakhova and the Kazakh film “Bauyrina Salu” by Askhat Kuchinchirekov are participating in it. Both focus on the complex relationships that develop between adult children and their parents. Judging by the annotations, family problems are among the main ones that concern aspiring filmmakers from various regions in these days of global instability.

Undoubtedly, the “Pearls” program will be the focus of audience interest. This year it contains almost all the festival hits of the year: Justine Trieu’s “Falling Trajectory,” which won at Cannes, and Matteo Garrone’s “I Am Captain,” which was just awarded in Venice, and “Beautiful Days” by Wim Wenders, and “May, December » Todd Haynes, and many others.