The Jury Prize was given to another of the best-liked films in the festival, Good Valley Stories. Director José Luis Guerin’s documentary was admired for the authenticity and good humor with which it portrays a sprawling international community outside Barcelona that includes many migrants and refugees.

The Best Director award was presented to Belgian filmmaker Joaquim Lafosse for his autobiographical, playful account of an unusual vacation, Six Days in Spring.

And the Audience Award? Voters didn’t hesitate: they chose the most intensely emotional and directly political film of the moment, The Voice of Hind Rajab. Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania recreates a horrific real incident in which a Palestinian girl and her family are killed during the Israeli invasion of Gaza. The Euskadi Basque Country Agenda 2030 prize, awarded by the regional Basque government, also went to the heart-breaking Gaza docudrama, fresh from its Venice premiere.

What was most remarkable was that practically everybody who went on stage at the closing ceremony (including the hosts) were wearing a “Stop Genozidioa” button or the Palestine flag (“genozidioa” is genocide in Basque). And Ruiz de Azúa, the Golden Shell winner, remarked that her moral compass tells her “this is the moment to condemn genocide in Gaza.”

Political protest has long been a fixture at San Sebastian, on screen and off, with Gaza clearly a major galvanising issue this year. Pro-Palestine slogans were carved into the sand of the main beach while a street protest blocked the bridge to the Kursaal early in the festival, making access to certain film screenings tricky.

But the most unexpected political statement in the program was made in Nuremberg, starring a diabolically oily Russell Crowe as Nazi war criminal Hermann Goering. Though it takes place 80 years ago, James Vanderbilt’s historical courtroom drama is full of cautionary warnings about resurgent fascism in modern America, earning loud cheers  from the audience with every heavily underscored allusion to Donald Trump.

San Sebastian Audiences

Festival audiences, in fact, have never shied away from making their voices heard, and they are in large part responsible for San Sebastian’s 73 years of success. It was inaugurated in 1953 in an impoverished post-war Spain under a dictatorship, at a time when the local film industry was barely producing 20 films a year, almost all of them religious. Today local Basque and Spanish audiences still fill the theaters at every screening. One crowd may applaud and shout “guapa” at Angelina Jolie. Another long line waits under a downpour at 10 p.m. for a black-and-white subtitled oldie. This respectful but opinionated audience is likely to burst into spontaneous applause halfway through a screening —especially at political dialogues. And – though maddening to some outsiders — it’s a local tradition to rhythmically applaud the trombone for 15 seconds, during the festival’s promotional video that plays before every film.

Location: San Sebastian

This year the city of San Sebastian itself played a prominent role in multiple films, ranging from the queer coming-of-old-age comedy-drama Maspalomas to the Ron Perlman-starring revenge thriller The Gentleman. The local setting went down well with the audience, clearly excited to see the Basque city’s representations on screen that were sometimes thoughtful, and never less than entertaining.

Welcome Streamers

After Venice, San Sebastian is the biggest European festival to showcase Netflix releases (including this year’s opening film, 27 Nights). Unlike in Venice, professionals in attendance generally do not feel the need to reflexively boo the big capital N the minute it appears on screen. In fact, that outrage was saved for a different streamer, as MUBI has recently come under fire for its ties to an investor with connections to an Israeli defense-tech startup founded during the current Gaza conflict. This also spilled over into the question of freedom of the press, since a Spanish journalist’s question about the matter was flatly rejected when addressed to Jennifer Lawrence (whose most recent star vehicle Die My Love will be released theatrically by MUBI).

SPECIAL JURY PRIZE
Good Valley Stories
Directed by José Luis Guerin

SILVER SHELL FOR BEST DIRECTOR
Joachim Lafosse
for Six Days in Spring

SILVER SHELL FOR BEST LEADING PERFORMANCE
Zhao Xiaohong
for Her Heart Beats in its Cage

Ramon Soroiz
for Maspalomas

SILVER SHELL FOR BEST SUPPORTING PERFORMANCE
Camila Plaate
for Belén

JURY PRIZE FOR BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
Los Tigres
Pau Esteve

JURY PRIZE FOR BEST SCREENPLAY
Six Days in Spring
Joachim Lafosse, Chloé Duponchelle, Paul Ismael

NEW DIRECTORS AWARD
Weightless
Emilie Thalund

HORIZONTES LATINOS AWARD
A Poet
Simon Mesa Soto

ZABALTEGI-TABAKALERA AWARD
The Ice Tower
Lucile Hadzihalilovic

AUDIENCE AWARD FOR BEST FILM
The Voice of Hind Rajab
Kaouther Ben Hania

As a fast-paced, action-packed story rooted in recent history, She Walks in Darkness is a hard to fault. But as an insight into the explosive cultural fault lines running through Spanish politics, it feels slight and evasive, a missed opportunity for viewers who prefer their pulse-racing crime stories with a bit of intellectual hinterland.

San Sebastián film festival has proved the perfect setting for this week’s out-of-competition world premiere of She Walks in Darkness, since much of the action takes place in the Basque coastal town. The fact that one of its producers, feted film-maker JA Bayona, is head of the festival’s jury may be pure coincidence. In fairness, this is a solidly entertaining exercise in suspense, and could well do brisk business at the Spanish box office, much like Undercover did last year, during its short domestic theatrical run next week ahead of its streaming launch on Netflix from October 17.

An acronym for Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, meaning “Basque homeland and freedom”, ETA were active between 1959 and 2018. Initially a pacifist resistance group against the repressive Franco regime, they later evolved into a paramilitary organisation motivated by an explosive cocktail of Catholicism, nationalism and revolutionary Marxism. After adopting armed struggle as a strategy in 1968, the group began a sustained campaign of assassinations, abductions and bombings, killing over 800 people and injuring more than 22,000.

She Walks in Darkness takes place during ETA’s stormy later years, when large demonstrations were held across Spain protesting against their bloody atrocities, and public support was plummeting even in the Basque region. Susana Abaitua plays Amaia, a Civil Guard officer recruited by her boss (Andrés Gertrúdix) to go deep undercover as a schoolteacher in San Sebastian, with the aim of being recruited into a terrorist cell.

With meticulous caution, Amaia slowly breaks through the group’s thick walls of secrecy, eventually becoming a minor foot soldier, but she remains under constant surveillance and suspicion. One false move, one small chink in her cover story, could mean certain death. Which makes for a powerfully tense atmosphere, reinforced by Yanes and cinematographer Paco Femenía painting the Basque region as a purgatorial realm of tobacco-stained gloom and perpetual rainfall.

The epidemic of militant leftist groups who terrorised late 20th century Europe, peaking in the 1970s and 1980s, has inspired some fine cinematic reassessments in recent years including The Baader Meinhof Complex (2080), Mesrine (2008) and Carlos (2010). While She Walks in Darkness is as gripping as any of these, it lacks their nuanced depth. Yanes seems strangely disinterested in the social, political and psychological forces that give birth to ETA. Aside from a few brief explanatory captions that bookend the film, historical context is very thin. The clandestine committee pulling the group’s strings are fleetingly glimpsed in meetings, hushed and monosyllabic, with no insight into their tactical decisions and broader political goals.

Yanes recreates the real murders of several ETA targets: a university professor, various politicians, police officers and more, but all in brisk snapshots with almost zero curiosity about why they were killed. The interior lives of the police characters are almost as thinly detailed. Amaia initially has a secret lover/husband, but he disappears midway through the film without further explanation. At one point, her police handler is accused of torturing terrorist suspects in jail, an intriguing based-on-reality subplot which also goes nowhere.

Jumping between northern Spain and southern France, where many of the ETA leadership lived in hiding, She Walks in Darkness is a consistently nerve-jangling, nail-biting ride. Yanes stages graphic violence with unsensational flair, while Abaitua is a beautiful and alert presence on screen, investing Amaia with compelling intensity despite her underwritten character. The colourful supporting cast includes veteran film-maker Jaime Chávarri in a supporting role, a nod for Spanish cult cinema fans. The director also appears in meta-fictional documentary The Last Rapture, another San Sebastián premiere this year.

While there is much to enjoy here, anyone unfamiliar with Spanish political history will be obliged to fill in the blanks with their own research, particularly younger and non-native viewers. A minor flaw perhaps, but it makes She Walks in Darkness a more conventional, less educational and ultimately less valuable film than it might have been.

Director, screenwriter: Agustín Díaz Yanes
Cast: Susana Abaitua, Andrés Gertrúdix, Iraia Elias, Raúl Arévalo, Ariadna Gil
Cinematography: Paco Femenía
Editing: Bernat Vilaplana
Music: Arnau Bataller
Producers: Belén Atienza, Sandra Hermida, Juan Antonio Bayona
Production company: Basoilarraren Filmak (Spain)
Venue: San Sebastián International Film Festival (official selection)
In Basque, Spanish, French
105 minutes

This second feature by Chinese filmmaker Zhang Zhongchen comes on the heels of his 2021 debut work The White Cow, which won Best Film and Best Director awards at the First Film Festival in China. Launching Zhang Zhongchen’s career on an international scale is Nighttime Sounds, which bowed in San Sebastian’s New Directors section and looks poised to receive more exposure in festivals. It should particularly interest fans of Asian cinema.

Here atmosphere triumphs over plot and casting is key to connecting the audience to the weak story. In the central role of the psychically gifted, 8-year-old Mao Qing is child star Chen Halin, whose slightly otherworldly face has already graced movies like Nice View and Let Go of my Baby. This admirably plucky little girl lives with her mom Hongmei (actress Li Yanxi), a sullen woman whose secret depths are gradually revealed as the film goes on. These involve her absent husband, a lover who no longer wants her, and a baby girl she has been forced to give to another woman to raise. Li Yanxi burns with passionate combustion in a climactic harvesting scene, where Hongmei’s lover returns and rejects her, humiliating her in front of the entire village.

Qing is also obsessed with her fiery mother and clearly hurt by the attention she devotes to her baby sister when they go together to visit the child. Details of the toddler’s parentage are left vague, allowing Hongmei’s blind maternal instinct to emerge more powerfully as she dotes on the child that is no longer hers to raise.

Qing is a sensitive child able to see more than most people. She seems to remember emerging from the birth canal and she recalls “the things that were taught to her” before she was born. Only she can see a strange child dressed all in white who suddenly appears, following her around the fields like the physical embodiment of her emotional turmoil. The newcomer is looking for its mother and is clearly the ghost of a long dead child. It gives Qing someone to talk to and play with, while she joins the search for the missing mother.

Apart from the ghost child, the village is haunted by the ruined remains of 800-year-old statues dating from the Song dynasty. Surreally, the statues – some headless, some integral – are lined up in two rows facing each other in the wheat fields of Maozhuang Village, where locals still work the land. Abandoned for centuries and forgotten by time, they bring still more mystery to Nighttime Sounds. Chang Reagon’s cinematography makes full expressive use of the film’s unusual setting, the statues suggesting so well the hidden emotions in the women, children and the elderly who have been left behind in this fertile, ancient land when the able-bodied men left to find jobs in the city.

Country-born Zhang Zhongchen was one of these emigrants to the capital. He got interested in film when he did a stint as a security guard at China’s premier Beijing Film Academy, before he broke into the cinema as an editor. He shares editing credit here with Huang Bingjie.

Director: Zhang Zhongchen
Screenwriters: Zhang Zhongchen, Li Zhigang
Producer: Chen Kunyang
Cast: Chen Halin, Li Yanxi, Gu Hanru
Cinematography: Chang Reagon
Editing: Zhang Zhongchen, Huang Bingjie
Music: Chen Retoy
Sound: Clark Zhao, Nancy Chen
Production company: Beijing San Yue Culture Media Co.
World sales: HKIFF Collection
Venue: San Sebastian Intl. Film Festival (New Directors)
In Mandarin Chinese
88 minutes

Based on a novel by Juan Bolea, Hidden Murder is smoothly directed by Antonio Hernandez, a veteran known for Beyond Remembrance (Berlin Panorama 2002), The Borgias and Matar el tiempo. Here he puts together an attractive, professional cast, a wealth of eye-candy locations both urban and in the Pyrenees, and a plot with enough twists to puzzle most viewers until the final reveal.

At the center of the story is a newly formed family with some very dark secrets in their closet. Eva (Blanca Suarez, The Skin I Live In) has escaped from her violent ex José (Tamar Novas), a former cop, and she is beginning to relax in the fancy home she shares with successful writer Nazario (Eduardo Noriega, Red Queen) and his teenage daughter Ali (Claudia Mora). On their side, Nazario has lost his wife and Ali her mother under frightful circumstances which everyone avoids talking about, leaving the viewer guessing.

But now José is back and crazier than ever with jealousy. He accosts Eva at a wine store, causing her to drop a bottle of the expensive stuff, then turns up at Nazario’s birthday party for a quick spook. Eva is so rattled she decides to drive to the small village where she grew up, in the mountains, after dark, and with only the ambiguous, non-communicative Ali for company. Needless to say, bad things begin to happen, especially after someone sends José a message.

Handsomely lensed by Guillem Oliver and craftily edited by Antonio Frutos to save the last, most terrible surprises for the end, the film scores some chilling moments, using classic tropes, like POV shots that make us think someone is following Eva on her carefree walk up the mountain. The trick may be as old as cinema itself; the important thing is convincing the audience it wants to be frightened.

Noteworthy among the cast of pros, several of whom turn out to be playing very sick characters, is the disconcerting presence of newcomer Claudia Mora as the unpredictable daughter.

Director: Antonio Hernandez
Screenwriter: Rafael Calatayud Cano based on a novel by Juan Bolea
Producers: Ramiro Acero, Antonio Pita, Jorge Pérez Gaudio
Cast:  Blanca Suárez, Eduardo Noriega, Tamar Novas, Claudia Mora, Marian Álvarez, Joaquin Climent
Cinematography: Guillem Oliver
Editing: Antonio Frutos
Music: Luis Ivars
Sound: Jose Manuel Sospedra, Juan Ferro
Production companies: Sunrise Pictures in association with Parecido a un asesinato la pelicula (Spain), Prisma (Argentina)
World sales: Film Factory Entertainment (Spain)
Venue: San Sebastian Film Festival (RTVE Screenings)
In Spanish
111 minutes

The setting for A Scary Movie is a real semi-abandoned hotel in Lisbon, where the director and his 12-year-old son Nuno are spending the summer holidays together. Though this elegantly crumbling residence is nowhere near as huge or remote as the Overlook, Oksman includes numerous playful allusions to Kubrick’s supernatural thriller: a silhouette behind a shower curtain, a deserted bar, eerie vintage photos, low-slung cameras prowling the empty corridors, a mysterious room that must never be visited. Nuno also watches The Shining for the first time during the holiday, and seems amusingly unimpressed.

But the real phantoms here are the ghosts from Oksman’s past: old flames, estranged family members, lingering regrets, half-finished projects. Newly separated from his wife, the directed uses the creepy, ominous tropes of the horror genre to ruminate on his own family’s cursed history of divorce and abandonment. He interweaves this contemporary father-son story with archive footage of his own father, Simão, who left his wife and children early in the marriage, slipping our of contact for decades. The director tracked his father down in São Paolo in 2013, returning a year later to make a poignant memoir-film about him, On Football (2015), just as Simão was dying. He includes footage of their awkward reunion here, and shares his anxiety that he will one day be similarly estranged from Nuno.

Another ghost story woven into A Scary Movie is the macabre case of Portugal’s first serial killer, Diogo Alves, who is believed to have robbed and murdered up to 100 people by throwing them from the 65-metre tall Águas Livres aqueduct in Lisbon between 1836 and 1839. One the last criminals in Portugal to receive a death penalty, Alves inspired two of the country’s earliest fiction films. Oksman includes clips of both here, complete with droll critical voice-over commentary from Nuno (“pretty lame”). Alongside footage from his own unfinished documentary about Alves, which features a creepy true-horror shot of the killer’s head preserved in formaldehyde, father and son also retrace his steps inside the gloomy stone corridors of aqueduct, where Nuno shows fear for the first time. “If you can’t read Google Maps then we’re super lost,” he frets.

A Scary Movie is an intimate, quiet, open-ended film that would have had more punch if Oksman had dug deeper into his key theme, exploring the parallels between cinematic horror and its real-life equivalent. Art-house audiences will appreciate the subtlety and ambiguity, but there is arguably a richer, fuller, bolder version of the director’s strong premise lurking in the shadows of his slender sketchbook feature. That said, this artful documentary certainly has the singular feel of a personal passion project, and is full of pleasingly lyrical touches. “Sooner or later, every image harbours ghosts,” Oksman muses. “That’s what scares me.”

Director, screenwriter: Sergio Oksman
Cast: Nuno Oksman, Sergio Oksman, Daniel Blaufuks, Ana Moreira
Cinematography: Francisco Marise, Jorge Rojas
Editing: Ana Pfaff, Moncho Fernández, Sergio Oksman
Producers: Sergio Oksman, Joao Matos, Fernando Franco
Production company: Dok Films SL (Spain)
World sales: Patra Spanou Film, Germany
Venue: San  Sebastián International Film Festival (Zabaltegi Tabakalera)
In Spanish, Portuguese
72 minutes

Central to the whole mixture is Vicente (Jose Ramón Soroiz) who, at three quarters of a century, is living the life on the Canary Islands: cheerfully and unabashedly gay, he copes with a recent break-up by cruising the local beaches and engaging in casual sex with fellow queer men who have a predilection for older guys (the opening scene plays like a geriatric take on a similar set-up in Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake). He does this without a worry in the world, since an old friend is in charge of the financial support for both Vicente and his dog.

Then, one day, things change radically: a medical emergency brings Vicente back to his hometown of San Sebastián, where he has to recuperate within the confines of a retirement home, since his family is in no condition to take care of him. Not least because, having abandoned his wife and daughter years ago after realizing he was gay, the old man is essentially a stranger to his now adult offspring, who has a son of her own and has not told him about the complicated backstory.

Faced with a new living situation, Vicente must also deal with being back in the closet, as it’s unlikely his fellow residents would be open to such a detail. The staff is a different matter, especially when it turns out the protagonist’s assistant, tasked with helping him get through the routine required to make a full recovery, is not so secretly gay. But that may prove a moot point once external circumstances make their way into the home’s everyday activities (the story takes place in the months leading up to the European Covid outbreak, but in a way that feels neither lazy nor exploitative).

From the beginning, the movie’s charm rests primarily in the eyes of Soroiz, filled with hope and lust for life in the early stages and subsequently with dejection when Vicente has to rebuild his existence from the ground up. His face, a melting pot of conflicting emotions, is our guide on a journey of self-rediscovery where the spiritual turmoil is reflected in the film’s sense of place: cinematographer Javier Agirre bathes us all in the intoxicating sunshine of the Canary Islands, making us feel Vicente’s euphoria, before successfully making San Sebastián, one of the more scenic locations available, look as drab as possible through the lens of the main character’s inability to have his usual fun once he’s back on home turf.

It all builds to a quietly emotional climax that meditates on various types of isolation (even before the pandemic element kicks in, Vicente is a bit of a shut-in by choice, partly because of his medical conundrum), having devoted two hours to the meaning of friendship and family in the context of what is essentially a coming-of-old-age narrative. And when the visual punchline hits, it’s cathartic in the most unexpected manner.

Directors: Jose Mari Goenaga, Aitor Arregi
Screenwriter: Jose Mari Goenaga
Cast: Jose Ramón Soroiz, Nagore Aranburu, Kandido Uranga
Producer: Xabier Berzosa
Cinematography: Javier Agirre
Production design: Mikel Serrano
Costume design: Saioa Lara
Music: Aránzazu Calleja
Sound: Alazne Ameztoy, Álex F. Capilla, Nacho Royo-Villanova
Production companies: Irusoin SA, Maspalomas Pelikula AIE, Moriarti Produkzioak SL
World sales: Film Factory Entertainment
Venue: San Sebastián International Film Festival (Official Selection)
In Basque, Spanish
115 minutes

Like a Hong Sang-soo film with more narrative, Two Seasons is all about modern relationships and how difficult they are to make work. The director seems to wink at Hong by making one of his central characters a Korean woman screenplay writer who has moved to Japan, and who finds herself in an unpleasant bubble of isolation and insecurity. In one scene she attends the screening of a film she wrote and has to do a Q&A alongside the film director. Tongue-tied and embarrassed, all she can say is ,“I have no talent.” But the mood shifts to humor when she’s asked what she’s currently working on, and she mumbles something about a ninja project that can’t get off the ground.

Based on the 1960s mangas “A View of the Seaside” and “Mr. Ben and his Igloo” by Yoshiharu Tsuge, the two stories interconnect in a complicated way. The first, about two lonely young people who meet on the beach, is cleverly prefaced by a scene showing Li (Shim Eun-kyung) open her notebook and begin a fresh screenplay writing “Scene 1: Summer: Seaside.” The strong implication is that she is creating the story that follows. Ergo, it’s “just” a story and the audience is challenged to remember that nothing on screen is real.

Yet when Nagisa (Yuumi Kawai) arrives in a chauffeured car in the fishing village on a hillside, now an oddly deserted resort town, we are instantly plunged into the girl’s unhappiness. As she mentions to Natsuo (Mansaku Takada), a lonely boy she chats to on the beach, she has been abandoned by someone and is trying to forget. The two hit it off, but the next day it is raining hard. Nagisa removes her dress, revealing an enticing bikini, and challenges Natsuo to go swimming anyway, despite the evident danger of tall waves crashing far from shore. The hint of eroticism blends sickeningly with a hidden death wish.

In the second, much lighter story, Li is hungry for adventure and relives, in a different key, the story she has written. The scene shifts to winter and a holiday town high in the mountains. A snowstorm is in progress as Li arrives by train, bundled head to toe against the elements but with no hotel reservation. Surprise, all the available rooms are fully booked. Li finds herself alone on the snow-obliterated road with a map in hand, the wind rising, and sets off with comic hopelessness to reach a traditional mountaintop inn before dusk falls.

Like the beach story, the environment assumes a huge influence over the characters’ mood and well-being. With the streets drained of people, these utterly Japanese locations become full of symbolic significance in director of photography Yuta Tsukinaga’s majestic visuals, which underline the smallness of human beings in such a powerful natural world.

But the feeling shifts to manageable when Li finds the inn, an impressively prehistoric affair whose neglected exterior and interior look adapted from a samurai epic. It is owned and run by Benzo (Shinichi Tsutsumi), a gruff hermit of few words, who casually tells Li to bed down anywhere she likes – it’s a one-room hut. Their relationship grows from there, though not along the erotic lines that Li’s young couple seemed ready to take. For one thing, Benzo has an ex-wife and daughter living in a much more upscale inn up the road, a fact Li learns in a jolly nighttime trek through the snow to steal a golden carp from their pond. Mayhem ensues. In the end, Li admits it’s the most fun she’s had in years – a healing experience rather than a romance, but leaving audience and characters alike with a positive glow.

Director: Shô Miyake
Screenwriter: Shô Miyake, based on a manga by Yoshiharu Tsuge
Producers: Masayoshi Jonai, Yuji Sadai
Cast:  Eun-Kyung Shim, Yumi Kawai, Shinichi Tsutsumi, Mansaku Takada, Shiro Sano
Cinematography: Yuta Tsukinaga
Editing: Keiko Okawa
Music: Hi’ Spec
Sound: Takamitsu Kawai
Production companies: The Fool, Bitters End
World sales: Bitters End
Venue: San Sebastian Film Festival  (Zabaltegi/Tabakalera)
In Japanese
89 minutes

“Solo puedo hacer cine desde una posición de cariño” dijo José Luis Guerin en la rueda de prensa.  Y ese amor está en cada uno de los 122 minutos del documental Historias del Buen Valle en competencia en el Festival de San Sebastián.

“I can only make films from a position of love,” said the Spanish director José Luis Guerin at his San Sebastian press conference. And that love permeates every one of the 122 minutes of his documentary Good Valley Stories, premiering in competition at the festival.

Commissioned by the Madrid Museum of Contemporary Art to make a short film, Guerin became so involved with the Vallbon neighborhood, the focus of the project, that he worked on the film until its release three years later. It is a mosaic of stories about Vallbon (Good Valley in Catalan) on the outskirts of Barcelona, and its inhabitants. The settlement has existed since the Middle Ages. Small houses were built at the beginning of the 20th century, and new buildings have appeared in recent years. A sign on the screen says “People from the south have begun to arrive.” South of what? We wonder. Well, the south of Spain at first, then from the economic south, the area that migrants and refugees come from. It is home to Catalans (some own the original houses), Andalusians, Portuguese, Moroccans, Indians, Ukrainians, Russians, and Roma from various countries.

Vallbon was always considered rural and retains that character to this day with a stream that forms a pond, small family gardens, plants and flowers. The documentary begins with a sequence filmed in black and white Super 8, accompanied by a solitary trumpet. Then volunteers are filmed in natural color, telling their stories like talking heads against a monochrome background. Then, as if we had become friends, we begin to follow them in their daily lives.

José Luis Guerin is a gifted storyteller able to shift from fiction (En la ciudad de Silvia) to documentary (Innisfree, En construcción) and back again. He is also a respectful filmmaker. He shows us only public spaces, never bedrooms, and only those conversations the subjects wish to share. At a funeral, we hear the chorus but not the eulogy.

These stories break many prejudices and stereotypes. The first is the association of low income with sadness. In this neighborhood, there is laughter, dancing, and music of many styles, including classical. Another prejudice overturned is the association of cosmopolitanism with urbanity. In Vallbon there are as many languages spoken as in Madrid; children are fluent in at least two without being taught in school.

But this is not an oasis of modern life. The problems are the same as anywhere, from climate change and bullying to unplanned urban development. But the sense of community, tolerance for diversity, and the coexistence of generations make the inhabitants of Vallbon feel privileged. The audience is lucky to watch such an optimistic and authentic film in this dark moment.

A technical stand-out is the complex sound design. There is no gratuitous music and after the opening trumpet, every sound comes from the residents: music, singing, conversations, and silences.

The editing, by the director, makes the narrative entertaining without being superficial, which will make it palatable to diverse audiences.

Director, screenplay, editing: José Luis Guerin
Producers: Javier Lafuente, Jonás Trueba, José Luis Guerin, Gaelle Jones
Cinematography: Alicia Almiñana
Music: Anahit Simonian
Sound: Maximiliano Martínez, Pablo Rivas Leyva
Art direction: Clara Serrano
Production companies: Orfeo Iluso AIE (Spain), Los Ilusos Films (Spain) in association with Perspective Films (France)
World sales: Shellac (France)
Venue: San Sebastian Film Festival (Competition)
Running time: 122 min.
In Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Russian and Ukranian.

“Tasio is very good in showing the idea of how to give films a new life,” says the archive’s director Joxean Fernández in an interview with The Film Verdict. “The film went to Cannes Classics and was then shown at Il Cinema Ritrovato [in Bologna]. Then we went home, 40 years after its premiere at San Sebastián, and then on to the Lumiere Festival [in Lyon]. Tasio showed us the way about how we shouldn’t just restore films people already know, but also films people could discover.”

True to his word, Fernández and his team had taken up an even bigger challenge this year. Rather than zeroing in on yet another feature, the archive had opted to work on four relatively uncelebrated medium-length films from 1985-86: Xabier Elorriaga’s Zergatik panpox, about a woman’s travails from youth to single motherhood; Alfonso Ungria’s Ehun metro, which revolves around a fugitive ETA activist’s recollections of his life; Anjel Lertxundi’s Hamaseigarenean aidanez, a two-parter about a chronic gambler and his long-suffering wife; and José Julián Bakedano’s Oraingoz izen gabe, about the deadly love triangle between two brothers and a sex worker they brought into their home.

Apart from their lengths, what cast these films apart from Tasio will be their language. While very much celebrated for its depiction of Basque culture and traditions, Armendáriz’s film was made in Spanish – something the filmmaker took quite some flak when he made the film four decades ago. In contrast, the four mid-length films bowing at San Sebastián this year were all made in Basque.

“Tasio is a great film, and we love it, but this time we’d like to show a film made in Basque,” said Fernández. The international reach of the screenings might not work like Tasio did, he admitted, “but this another different kind of initiative… it’s an encouraging, small project which highlights the presence of Basque-language cinema.”

Similar to the process in restoring Tasio, the archive retrieved original negatives from the archive and the Spanish Film Library, and commissioned the Bologna-based L’Immagine Ritrovata to restore the films. “And the filmmakers are all alive,” said Fernández. “I called them and they agreed to go to Bologna to help us with this, and it gave the restorations a legitimacy.” He’s not wrong: the restorations are pristine without being too refined for their time, with the texture of the era being more or less retained.

More than that, the selection also highlighted the crossover between Basque literature and cinema, with three of the four films being adaptations of Basque novels. While Oraingoz izen gabe was based on Argentine novelist Jorge Luis Borges’s story “The Intruder”, the film itself is a radical localized reimagination of the source material, with screenwriter Bernardo Atxaga relocating the narrative from a Buenos Aires suburb in the late 19th century to a village in the middle of the Basque countryside in the 1980s.

According to Fernández, these short films are significant as they represent the burgeoning of an indigenous and independent regional cinema after years of suppression and stagnation of Basque culture under Francisco Franco’s fascist regime. The end of the dictatorship in 1975 and Spain’s transition to democracy ushered in what is now known as the “Debates on Basque Cinema” in 1976, with activists, academics and artists proclaiming the very politicised need of “inseparably associating Basque cinema and the Basque language”, the archive director wrote in his seminal book on Basque cinema.

While a few filmmakers like Antxon Ezeiza did manage to forge ahead with features, the lack of resources and a well-established infrastructure had forced directors – especially younger ones – to work on short films. It would take the Basque Government’s enactment of cinematography laws and the establishment of production incentives, plus the launch of the Basque public broadcaster Euskal Telebista, for Basque-language cinema to bloom in the mid-1980s. (It is no coincidence that the archive’s restoration programme was completed with support from the government and the broadcaster.)

The four films were representative of “a new cinema being born”, Fernández said, pointing to how the filmmakers would eventually pass the baton to a later generation of Basque filmmakers – among them Julio Medem and Alex de la Iglesia – who would eventually rise to international prominence with their wildly diverse films.

“We suffered a lot during the dictatorship, when we were not allowed to speak our own language – but we are now winning this battle, so we obviously have to take care of our own language,” said Fernández. This conversation about past clampdowns and censorship remains more relevant than ever, he added, at a time when certain politicians have called for whitewashing past dictatorships – a reference, perhaps, to the Spanish far-right’s attempts to revise Franco’s legacy.

Somehow, the restorations work in tandem with the San Sebastián International Film Festival’s own efforts to advocate more awareness among the younger generation about the perils of authoritarianism. In a section titled “Youth, Cinema, Memory and Democracy”, the festival will screen Patricio Guzman’s Chile, Obstinate Memory, Jean-Gabriel Périot’s reenactment of activist films in Our Defeats, Pablo Gil Rituero’s The Drunkmen’s Marseillaise (about an artistic collective’s clandestine collection of protest songs in Francoist Spain in 1961) and David Varela’s An Impossible Sky (in which young people are asked to read and reinterpret the records of fighters on both sides of the political divide during the Spanish Civil War).

Just as importantly, the festival will also host a screening of Basilio Martin Patino’s Songs for After A War, a 1971 documentary which was banned by the authorities and finally released in 1976. This programme was co-organised by the festival with the Commission for the Holding of the 50th Anniversary of Spain in Freedom, a body set up to mark the end of the Franco regime in 1975.

“The festival has to be a place where we can talk, that we can have dialogues to express films in a free way,” said Fernández, who is also a member of the management committee of the San Sebastián film festival.

The festival also serves as the platform for the archive’s further public outreach, he said. The four restored Basque-language medium-length films will tour the Basque Country from October to December, with screenings at Bilbao, Vitoria, Pamplona and the French city of Saint-Jean-de-Luz.

Based on Lawrence Osborne’s critically acclaimed 2013 novel of the same name, Ballad of a Small Player is scripted by Rowan Joffe, a writer-director in his own right on big and small screen (Tin Star, Before I Go to Sleep). After earning mixed reviews at its Telluride and Toronto premieres, this Netflix production makes its European festival debut this week in San Sebastián. A short cinema run is planned next month, followed by streaming from October 29.

A dapper dresser with the dandyish pencil moustache of a 1950s matinee idol, Farrell’s aristocratic anti-hero Lord Freddy Doyle puts a contemporary twist on classic Graham Greene archetypes, all those boozy expats starring into the spiritual abyss in some faraway colonial outpost. Waking up with a weapons-grade hangover in his trashed hotel suite to face another day of huge debuts and unpaid bills, Doyle repeatedly assures himself he is just one lucky card game away from the big win that will solve all his problems. The trouble is, his creditors no longer believes this high-wire bravado act, and are threatening to call the police.

Minor spoiler alert: it quickly becomes clear that Doyle is not some louche English playboy, but is in fact a working-class Irish con man called Brendan Reilly who sweet-talks old ladies out of their life savings. Breathing down his neck is nervy British private investigator Cynthia Blithe (Tilda Swinton), who offers him a last-ditch deal to pay back the stolen loot or face arrest.

The only flicker of hope in the purgatorial prison of high-stakes addiction that Doyle/Reilly has built for himself is kindly casino worker Dao Ming (Fala Chen), who offers him one last shot at redemption for obscure motives of her own. Pulling him out of his self-destruct spiral, she spirits him away to her floating hide-out in the tranquil Hong Kong backwater of Lamma Island, where a wild stroke of luck becomes a definitive reckoning with his own demons.

In stylistic terms, Ballad of a Small Player plays a supremely confident hand, so full of swagger and bravado that it takes a good hour to reveal it isn’t really holding any high-value cards. Berger and cinematographer James Friend (who also shot All Quiet on the Western Front) capture the gaudy, grungy, glitzy spectacle of Macau with great visual brio, percussive editing and a sharp eye for colourful urban tableaux.

Farrell gives a reliably compelling, layered performance full of sweaty close-ups and suave evasions, by turns charmingly cocksure and painfully vulnerable, switching accents and registers between scenes. There are fireworks galore here, but thankfully Farrell sticks to the golden rule: however wild the role, however gonzo the character, never go full Nicolas Cage.

Alas, Chen is stuck with a fairly one-dimensional Oriental Pixie Dream Girl part while Swinton gives us another of her mannered, bad-haired, aggressively “normal” late-career caricatures, once more begging the question whether she has ever actually met any normal people. All the main characters feel like purely cinematic confections, pale copies of familiar screen archetypes, dampening any emotional engagement. Volker Bertelmann’s strident score does not help, insistent and bombastic and subtle as a shovel in the face.

A riotous rollercoaster ride, with salvation on one side and damnation on the other, Ballad of a Small Player works best in its sardonic slapstick-noir scenes, especially when the wily Doyle/Reilly justifies his own sins by confronting friends and foes alike over their own greed, hypocrisy and small-minded ambitions. A final shift in narrative momentum, where droll cynicism about the human condition gives way to corny shock twists, cheesy epiphanies and silly supernatural subplots, lacks the same authentic bite. Berger’s superior exercise in deluxe trash works as a glossy guilty pleasure for most of its runtime, but this is a minor work for both director and star.

Director: Edward Berger
Screenwriter: Rowan Joffe, based on the Lawrence Osbourne novel
Cast: Colin Farrell, Fala Chen, Tilda Swinton, Deanie Ip, Alex Jennings
Camera: James Friend
Editor: Nick Emerson
Music: Volker Bertelmann
Producers: Mike Goodridge, Edward Berger, Matthew James Wilkinson
Production companies: Good Chaos (UK), Nine Hours (Germany), Stigma Films (UK)
Venue: San Sebastián International Film Festival (Official Selection)
World sales: Netflix
In English, Cantonese
104 minutes

Cuerpo celeste (literally, heavenly body) is the second feature directed by Nayra Ilic Garcia after her 2011 debut Metro cuadrado. It has been making the rounds of festivals, winning a special mention at Tribeca and earning a spot in San Sebastian’s prestigious Horizontes Latinos.

The one great, silent character that appears in every scene is the mighty desert that caresses the Chilean coast. A long, deserted beach of sand dunes introduces Celeste, her family and friends at play, frolicking in the water with the carefree, self-centered entitlement of children. It’s the last day of the year and the adults are stoned, leaving Celeste and two local boys to enjoy themselves splashing in the water, ignoring warnings to be careful of riptides. That note of danger, reinforced by the music and joking references to the word “dark”, has to lead somewhere. Unexpectedly, it is Celeste’s beloved father who dies, in a sudden and irrevocable moment, banally playing paddle ball.

After this shock, the story becomes more atmosphere than incident. Celeste shuffles from her aunt (Mariana Loyola) to her mother (played by Daniela Ramirez, who starred in the surreal Zafari), and who is trying to sell their remote desert house after putting her late husband’s things in order. These include 7-million year old fossilized whale bones and sharks’ teeth which they casually removed from the sand and rock of the desert.

But there are artifacts of human life hidden there, too. Ilic Garcia is not the first to point out a connection between the buried fossils in the ancient desert and the recent human remains added by the Pinochet regime, which disappeared its opponents and buried many under the sands. There are certainly deliberate echoes here of Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzman and his stunning 2010 documentary Nostalgia for the Light, though little of the master’s magical atmosphere. Still, Sergio Armstrong’s camerawork is graced with awe-inspiring images of the starry night sky and the oddly human desert formations, while Celeste’s growing pains are punctuated by radio announcements about Pinochet and his cabinet. She finally learns the meaning of the police tape around random spots in the desert where bodies have resurfaced. One wonders whether these macabre digs, which have just risen into Celeste’s adolescent consciousness, will illuminate her life in some way, perhaps drawing her out of her sulky self-centeredness and refusal to communicate with her family.

Director, screenwriter: Nayra Ilic Garcia
Producers: Luigi Chimienti, Alessandro Amato, Florencia Rodriguez, Dominga Ortuzar
Cast: Helen Mrugalski, Daniela Ramírez, Nicolás Contreras, Néstor Cantillana, Mariana Loyola
Cinematography: Sergio Armstrong
Production design: Natalia Geisse
Editing: Valeria Hernandez
Music: David Tarantino
Sound: Peter Rosenthal
Production companies: Planta, Horamagica in association with Disparte, Oro Films
World sales: Intramovies
Venue: San Sebastian Film Festival (Horizontes Latinos)
In Spanish
100 minutes

Ronan, who of course made an impression very early on, earning an Oscar nomination for her work in Atonement at the age of 14, is a very pertinent choice for the role of a school teacher trying to get the best out of the next generation in an unspecified British locale (principal photography took place in Bristol). Except the task is harder than anticipated, due to an 11-year old pest called Danny (Eddie Waller). In the opening scene, which explains the title in gleefully unsubtle fashion, the kid in question sabotages some machinery during a school trip by throwing his shoe into it.

Maria (Ronan) would like some help to deal with Danny so he doesn’t disrupt class activities too much, but the school budget cannot afford an extra teacher just to rein him in. This backfires drastically when the boy’s antisocial behavior causes another student, Pauline (Nia Brown), to be physically injured, putting Maria’s continued employment in jeopardy. Danny gets suspended as a result, but it’s not a given he will avoid coming in the next day. And since an inspection is scheduled for that same day, desperate times may call for desperate measures…

By its nature, the film’s dramatic and comedic thrust rests primarily on the younger actors’ shoulders, and on that front Bad Apples delivers in spades. Waller, making his film debut, is on a level comparable to Jack Gleeson as Joffrey Baratheon, in that he very convincingly embodies a kid so utterly and (sometimes) cheerfully despicable it’s easy to relate to everyone else deeming him an irredeemable little turd (for lack of a better term). Brown is similarly revelatory with a character who is equal parts endearing and obnoxious, a duality she effortlessly conveys with as little as a perfectly calibrated smile.

Hovering above them, Ronan gets to flex her comedy muscles in unexpected ways, clearly relishing the opportunities provided by a script that is not afraid to go all the way when the premise suddenly turns fairly insane. And while the plot does stretch plausibility at times, it’s never any less than unrelentingly amusing thanks to the cast’s commitment to the increasing insanity and Etzler’s refusal to let the movie pause for breath once it’s reached the point of no return where the blend of humor and tension is concerned (the director’s Nordic background is most evident in the tonal big swings).

Running at a brisk 99 minutes, the movie also knows when to bow out: just as one may think the suspense is at risk of deflation in the concluding stretch, Bad Apples makes sure the finale won’t spoil the fun, ending on just the right note of tense hilarity to, in a manner of speaking, close out the school year. As such, Etzler’s career is ripening nicely, although most viewers will probably be curious to see how the kids’ professional paths blossom, should they choose to continue acting beyond this very promising, exhilarating early showcase.

Director: Jonatan Etzler
Screenwriter: Jess O’Kane
Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Jacob Anderson, Eddie Waller, Nia Brown, Rakie Ayola, Robert Emms, Sean Gilder
Producer: Oskar Pimlott
Cinematography: Nea Asphäll
Production design: Jacqueline Abrahams
Costume design: Sarah Blenkinsop
Music: Chris Roe
Sound: Andreas Franck
Production companies: Pulse Films, HanWay Films
World sales: Republic Pictures
Venue: San Sebastián International Film Festival (New Directors)
In English
99 minutes

Uno de los descubrimientos de la ecléctica competencia del Festival de San Sebastián este año es el cautivador drama familiar “Los domingos”, de la directora Alauda Ruiz de Azúa.

Basado en su ingenioso guion que alterna entre la comedia y el drama hasta su agridulce pero satisfactorio desenlace. El dilema de una joven brillante, que se prepara para ir a la universidad y siente la llamada de la vocación religiosa, es abordado con seriedad y respeto por la cineasta, aunque a menudo con frivolidad por su despectiva familia, que a menudo se portan como católicos solo de nombre.

Pero cualquiera que sean sus creencias, la audiencia estará de parte de la heroína Ainara mientras toma una decisión crucial sin la ayuda de sus seres queridos. Con su tema peculiar y su hábil manejo, la película debería pasar fácilmente de festivales a cines y televisión, con posibilidades de llegar a los mercados internacionales.

Si bien gran parte de la película se desarrolla a través de un trabajo de cámara convencional y el humor realista de las peleas familiares, los niños mal portados y la vergüenza de las hormonas adolescentes, la historia siempre regresa a una dimensión más profunda. Esto se evidencia en la acertada elección de Blanca Soroa para el papel principal. Tiene el rostro sereno y pensativo de una Madonna adolescente con una profundidad emotiva al mismo nivel. Sin embargo, es solo una chica común y corriente atrapada en el torbellino  familiar por su posible decisión de dejarlos para siempre tras las rejas de un convento (aunque en la actualidad, según nos dicen, las normas que rigen la vida en clausura se han relajado un poco).

Ainara perdió a su madre siendo niña y ha sido criada por su padre, un empresario un tanto distante (Miguel Garcés), quien a tiene ahora una nueva familia. Dueño de un restaurante, confiesa durante la cena que acaba de gastar 310.000 euros en la reforma del local, para horror de su hermana Maite (Patricia López Arnaiz). Sus finanzas entrelazadas son uno de los puntos débiles de la película, ya que no queda claro quién hereda qué de quién en caso de fallecimiento de la abuela Lila, o quizás la confusión sea deliberada.

En cualquier caso, la tía Maite es una figura poderosa y dominante en la vida de Ainara, y la principal opositora a que la niña ingrese al convento para un período de prueba y “discernimiento”. La intensidad de su enfrentamiento es dolorosa, pues Maite insiste en su desacuerdo con una mirada de locura, y Ainara se ve acorralada e incómoda cuando todas sus respuestas a los desafíos de su tía caen en saco roto. La falta de armonía se extiende a la insatisfacción de Maite con su apático esposo (y padre de su hijo). Aunque él parece incapaz de luchar contra ella, es evidente que se están distanciando.
La tensión familiar se intensifica cuando descubren accidentalmente a Ainara con Mikel, el chico que le gusta, besándose en la cama. Esta vez es el papá quien se molesta, mientras Maite se regodea y usa el incidente como arma contra Ainara durante una entrevista con la madre superiora. La hábil dirección consigue añadir toques de humor a lo que, de otro modo, sería una escena desagradable y dolorosa.

El reparto es muy profesional de principio a fin, pero no todos los personajes funcionan tan bien como los miembros de la familia: las monjas, el joven sacerdote y algunos amigos del colegio de Ainara resultan demasiado obvios para encajar.
Lo que funciona espectacularmente es el uso de la música, un conmovedor coro de voces jóvenes que suena celestial, aunque la fuente —un coro escolar donde Ainara se encuentra con la tentación de Mikel— es bastante terrenal. Hay numerosos arreglos corales producidos por David Cerrejón, conocido por sus colaboraciones con Alberto Iglesias, junto con una astuta inserción de “Into My Arms” de Nick Cave. Cada vez que el público empieza a dejarse llevar por la corriente, la música se corta abruptamente. Solo después de que Ainara tome su decisión, tras una intensa escena en el funeral de su abuela, la música continúa hasta su conclusión durante los créditos finales. Es una forma única y hermosa de expresar lo inefable.

Directora y guionista: Alauda Ruiz de Azua
Productores: Marisa Fernández Armenteros, Sandra Hermide, Manu Calvo, Nahikari Ipina, Guillermo Farré, Fran Araujo
Elenco: Blanca Soroa, Patricia López Arnáiz, Miguel Garcés, Juan Minujín, Mabel Rivera, Nagore Aranburu
Fotografía: Bet Rourich
Diseño de producción: Zaloa Ziluaga
Diseño de vestuario: Ana Martínez Fesser
Edición: Andrés Gil
Música: David Cerrejón
Sonido: Andrea Sáenz Pereiro, Mayte Cabrera
Productoras: Buenapinta Media, Colosé Producciones, Encanta Films, Sayaka Producciones, Think Studio, Los Desencuentros Pelicula, Telefónica Audiovisual Digital
Ventas mundiales: El Pacte
Lugar: Festival de Cine de San Sebastián (Concurso)
En español
115 minutos

El año pasado, dos películas analizaron a mujeres que intentaban liberarse del yugo de la maternidad convencional con audacia. Amy Adams canalizó sus frustraciones con la ferocidad de un perro en Nightbitch, mientras que Nicole Kidman encontró un escape en una relación de dominación/sumisión con un becario en Babygirl. Ahora llega Isabel Aimé González Sola, quien ve sus frustraciones manifestadas a través de la hidrofobia en Las Corrientes. El nuevo largometraje de Milagros Mumenthaler es a menudo ingenioso, pero desafortunadamente, al igual que las películas mencionadas, encuentra soluciones fáciles justo cuando se necesita un cambio más audaz.

Lina (Sola), una diseñadora de modas argentina, está en Suiza para recibir un premio. Pero su rostro delata todo menos alegría. Tras tirar rápidamente la estatuilla a la basura, deambula por las calles antes de lanzarse desde un puente al agua. Se arrastra, se limpia y regresa a casa, pero no puede librarse del extraño estado de ánimo que la envolvió en el extranjero. “Es como si nunca hubieras regresado”, observa su esposo Pedro (Esteban Bigliardi). Distante y propensa al insomnio y a los ataques de pánico, Lina parece no poder adaptarse a la vida con Pedro y su hija Sofía (Emma Fayo Duarte). Peor aún, no soporta el agua corriente; ducharse es imposible, e incluso la presión del grifo es insoportable.

La película alcanza su máximo atractivo cuando se aleja de la narrativa tradicional. La referencia visual de Mumenthaler a la pintura Explosión de una locomotora de Jenaro Pérez Villaamil y el uso de piezas clásicas como “Something Wild In The City: Mary Ann’s Theme” de Morton Feldman y “The Planets, Op. 32: II. Venus, the Bringer of Peace” de Gustav Holst aportan una sensación etérea a la película. La secuencia inicial de ocho minutos de Las corrientes que documenta a Lina en Suiza, está casi exenta de diálogos, pero la cineasta ofrece algo realmente especial en el tercer acto. Mientras Lina y Sofia observan la ciudad desde una terraza en lo alto de su edificio de apartamentos, nos adentramos en ella, sumergidos en una instantánea imaginaria de las vidas de los personajes secundarios de la película. Momentos que Lina por ser artista y madre nunca conocerá ni experimentará, por las decisiones que ha tomado y por las que no. Porque la vida nos da un solo camino por el que damos tumbos. Es una secuencia hermosa y conmovedora que evoca el lenguaje visual de los primeros trabajos de F.W. Murnau o King Vidor.

Sin embargo, es decepcionante que, tras la preparación para el clímax, Las corrientesvse incline hacia un drama doméstico ordinario y ofrezca una explicación bastante anodina de la crisis existencial de Lina. El guion de Mumenthaler funciona mejor cuando vive y respira las ambigüedades del malestar e insatisfacción de Lina, y cómo las equilibra con sus responsabilidades como empresaria, esposa y madre dedicada. Diluir los toques más líricos con una narrativa más directa le resta fuerza a la película.

“No sé si son reales o solo un artificio para llenar el vacío”, dice Julia (Ernestina Gatti), colega de Lina, sobre la tensión de los gestos románticos. Llega al corazón de las incertidumbres de Lina sobre su vida, lo que ha dejado atrás y adónde va. Aunque Pedro añora a la mujer que conoció antes de que se fuera a Suiza, una cosa es segura: esa versión de Lina ya no existe. Mientras empuja las ventanas y escucha la lluvia al final de la película, la comprensión de que puede forjar una nueva identidad dentro de una sociedad que le exige someterse a sus exigencias es suficiente para mantenerla a flote.

Dirección y guión:Milagros Mumenthaler
Elenco: Isabel Aime Gonzalez Sola, Esteban Bigliardi, Emma Fayo Duarte, Ernestina Gatti

]]> https://thefilmverdict.com/si-no-ardemos-como-iluminar-la-noche/ Wed, 24 Sep 2025 15:55:44 +0000 https://thefilmverdict.com/?p=44122

Adapting Jack El-Hai’s 2013 non-fiction book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, Vanderbilt is stepping behind the camera for the first time after more than 20 years as a screenwriter and producer. His high-profile credits including David Fincher’s Zodiac (2003), plus several chapters in the Spider-Man and Scream franchises. With Nuremberg, he is clearly aiming for grand Spielberg-ian spectacle, but he too often falls back on soapy melodrama and cornball cliché. Even so, as an old-school period blockbuster with a stellar cast and serious moral questions at its core, this deluxe B-movie is never less than solidly entertaining. Premiered to mostly positive reviews in Toronto earlier this month, it lands on European shores at San Sebastian film festival this week ahead of worldwide release by Sony Pictures Classics in November.

In a testosterone-heavy cast, Michael Shannon seethes with barely contained disgust at man’s inhumanity to man as chief US prosecutor Robert H. Jackson, a supreme court judge fighting hard for the moral imperative of allowing the Nuremberg defendants due legal process rather than simply executing them. Remi Malek is jittery and troubled as Douglas M. Kelley, amateur magician and chief psychiatrist in the US Army’s European Theater of Operations, who is charged with assessing the mental well-being of the prisoners. And rising British star Leo Woodhall (The White Lotus) plays Sergeant Howie Triest, the military interpreter whose unruffled demeanour masks a traumatic secret back story.

But Nuremberg is largely dominated by Crowe’s full-blooded, steam-belching performance as Hermann Göring, anointed successor to Adolf Hitler, president of the Reichstag, commander in chief of the Luftwaffe, ruthless narcissist and all-round Nazi supervillain. As the real Kelly would later report in his book on the trials, 22 Cells in Nuremberg, Göring was also charming and witty company, a devoted family man and a master tactician in the courtroom. To his credit, Vanderbilt makes this manipulative charisma central to the prisoner’s slow-burn psychological chess match with Kelley, lending extra dramatic heft to the film’s core two-hander scenes between the pair.

Opening with a Tarantino-style image of a US soldier urinating on a swastika symbol, Vanderbilt’s pulpy directing style is untroubled by anything resembling nuance. The characterisation is two-dimensional at best, the score thumpingly bombastic and the screenplay relentlessly, groaningly literal. Almost every sentence in the first hour is leaden plot exposition, potted biography and explanatory context. A scene in which Jackson summons Kelley to the Nuremberg parade grounds for a wordy history lesson on Nazism could almost be a thinly rewritten Wikipedia entry.

Then again, maybe now is the right time for easily digestible warnings about the evils of fascism wrapped in a high-gloss Hollywood package. Vanderbilt is certainly keen to stress unsettling parallels between the Third Reich and the current political landscape, particularly Trump’s America with its inner circle of Nazi-saluting billionaire cranks and white supremacist goons. While Crowe’s Göring does not exactly claim Hitler wanted to “make Germany great again”, he says something very similar, calmly laying out how fascism draws its power by deliberately exploiting mass grievance and hatred of outsiders, a speech that winks heavily at 21st century audiences.

The most powerful sequence in Nuremberg is composed of pure archive footage. During the trial, Jackson shames the court into silence by screening real newsreel showing the massed corpses of Jewish prisoners and other victims of Nazi genocide at Bergen-Belsen, Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps. This chilling detour into documentary is a harrowing but necessary reminder of why films like this still need to be made, for all their preposterous pageantry and simplistic fabrications.

In 1947, the real Kelley told an Anti-Defamation League audience he believed all politicians should be psychologically examined before taking office. Nuremberg ends with Malek’s Kelley giving a radio interview to promote his book about the trials, in which he warns fascism could easily take root in the United States. This elicited loud cheers at the San Sebastian film festival press screening. But they were cheers of recognition, not joy.

Director, screenwriter: James Vanderbilt
Cast: Russell Crowe, Rami Malek, Michael Shannon, Leo Woodall, Richard E. Grant, John Slattery, Mark O’Brien, Colin Hanks, Lydia Peckham, Wrenn Schmidt, Lotte Verbeek
Cinematography: Dariusz Wolski
Editing: Tom Eagles
Music: Brian Tyler
Production designer: Eve Stewart
Costume designer: Bartholomew Cariss
Producers: Richard Saperstein, Bradley J. Fischer, James Vanderbilt, William Sherak, Frank Smith, Benjamin Tappan, Cherilyn Hawrysh, Istvan Major, George Freeman
Production companies: Bluestone Entertainment (US), Walden Media (US)
World sales: WME Independent
Venue: San Sebastian International Film Festival (Competition)
In English, German
149 minutes

One of the discoveries in this year’s eclectic San Sebastian festival competition is director Alauda Ruiz de Azua’s engaging family drama Sundays (Los domingos), based on her own clever screenplay which dips in and out of dramedy until its bittersweet yet satisfying conclusion. The dilemma of a bright, college-bound girl who feels the call of a religious vocation is treated seriously and respectfully by the filmmaker — though often flippantly by her dismissive family, who tend to be Catholics in name only.

But whatever side of the aisle the audience is on, they will find themselves cheering for the heroine Ainara as she goes through a life-changing decision process with no help from her loved ones. With its curious subject and skilled handling, the film should easily make the festival-to-theaters and TV crossover, with a shot at international markets.

While much of the film unfolds through conventional camerawork and the humorous realism of family tussles, misbehaving kids and the embarrassment of teenage hormones, the story always comes back to a deeper dimension. This is evident in the inspired choice of Blanca Soroa in the leading role. She has the calm, pensive face of a teenage Madonna and a soulful depth to match. Yet she is just an ordinary girl caught up in family turmoil over her potential decision to leave them for a lifetime behind convent bars (though in modern times the rules governing cloistered life have relaxed a bit, we are told.)

Ainara lost her mother at a young age and has been raised by her somewhat distant businessman father (Miguel Garcés), who now has a new family. A restaurant owner, he confesses over dinner that he has just spent 310,000 euros to renovate the place, much to his sister Maite’s horror (Patricia López Arnaiz). Their interwoven finances are one of the film’s weak points, as it is unclear who inherits what from whom in the event of Granny Lila’s death – or maybe the confusion is deliberate.

In any case, aunt Maite is a powerful, domineering figure in Ainara’s life, and the chief opponent to letting the girl go to the convent for a period of testing and “discernment”. The intensity of their confrontation is painful as Maite pushes her dissent with madly gleaming eyes, and Ainara is backed into a corner and uncomfortable when all her answers to her aunt’s challenges fall on deaf ears. The lack of harmony extends to Maite’s unmotivated dissatisfaction with her laid-back husband (and father of her son). Though he seems incapable of fighting her, it’s clear they are drifting apart.

Bringing family tensions to a head is the accidental discovery of Blanca and Mikel, a boy she likes, in bed kissing. This time it’s Dad who gets upset, while Maite gloats and weaponizes the incident to use against Ainara during an interview with the Prioress. The adroit directing manages to bring some notes of humor into what is otherwise an ugly, hurtful scene.

The cast is highly professional throughout, but not all the characters work as perfectly as the family members – the nuns, young priest and some of Ainara’s school friends feel a bit too obvious to click into place.

What does work spectacularly is the use of music, a thrilling chorus of young voices that sounds heavenly, even though the source – a school choir where Ainara meets temptation in the form of Mikel – is quite earthy. There are numerous choral arrangements produced by David Cerrejon, known for his collaborations with Alberto Iglesias, along with an astutely inserted “Into My Arms” by Nick Cave. Each time the audience starts getting caught up in the flow, the music abruptly cuts off. Only after Ainara reaches her decision, after an intense scene at her grandmother’s funeral, does the music continue to its conclusion over the end credits. It is a unique and beautiful way to express the ineffable.

Director, screenwriter: Alauda Ruiz de Azua
Producers: Marisa Fernandez Armenteros, Sandra Hermide, Manu Calvo, Nahikari Ipina, Guillermo Farré, Fran Araujo
Cast: Blanca Soroa, Patricia López Arnaiz, Miguel Garcés, Juan Minujín, Mabel Rivera, Nagore Aranburu
Cinematography: Bet Rourich
Production design:  Zaloa Ziluaga
Costume design: Ana Martinez Fesser
Editing: Andrés Gil
Music: David Cerrejon
Sound: Andrea Sáenz Pereiro, Mayte Cabrera
Production companies: Buenapinta Media, Colosé Producciones, Encanta Films, Sayaka Producciones, Think Studio, Los Desencuentros Pelicula, Telefonica Audiovisual Digital
World sales: El Pacte
Venue: San Sebastian Film Festival (Competition)
In Spanish
115 minutes