Under more generic, allegorically-entitled headings, the Festival has grouped together films not commonly offered (even in specialised sections) and which, nevertheless, deserve filmgoersí attention. Based on this philosophy, a number of cycles have seen the light, including "The Guys in the Photo", "Forgotten Films"; "You Only Live Once", "The Best 100 Years in our Lives", "The European Adventure", "Spanish Cinema Discoveries", "The Red Nightmare", "A Long Absence", the two editions dedicated to post-war Italian comedy, entitled "Hunger, Humour and Fantasy" and "The Boom Italian-Style", or "The TV Generation", "It Happened yesterday", "50 from the 50s", "Amongst friends and neighbours" last of these cycles.


INCORRECT@S

In this age of politically correct doctrinaire thinking, the San Sebastian Film Festival has selected a series of films that contradict this false uniformity. Throughout history various filmmakers have questioned the established order, by attacking the injustices and arbitrary nature of society, or by openly making fun of its myths and taboos. They are the people that we are paying homage to here.

The choice of films that we are offering in Incorrect@s is obviously capricious. Other films would have been equally possible. Each cinemagoer can remember films that surprised them because they offered a point of view that conflicted with the one defended by officialdom. Our criterion has been to choose those films that not only shocked people at the time but have a corrosive message that is still alive even today. So for example, we have the Marx Brothers’ Duck soup, that seventy years ago made fun of politics, and is still a crazed diatribe that rages against the stupidity of war. Or Buñuel’s L’âge d’or, that in 1930 attacked the moral principles of a bourgeoisie that stifled the individual. Or the legendary Mae West, who still hasn’t lost her incorrectness as an outrageous buxom nymphomaniac…

Most of the programme consists of more modern films, even including highly topical figures, such as the incisive Michael Moore (Roger & Me) or the imaginative Peter Jackson (Meet the Feebles). Incorrect@s proposes to run through all the genres, ranging from Jean Pierre Sinapi’s black humour (Nationale 7) to Woody Allen’s irony that attacked the mediocrity of bureaucratic superstructures in Don´t Drink the Water, an unknown film he made for television, and to include Luis G. Berlanga’s anarchism in his small-scale final film El sueño de la maestra; Cecilia Bartolomé’s feminist statement in her graduation practical at Film School (Margarita y el lobo); the social satire of the cartoons of South Park; Almodóvar’s first provocative film (Pepi, Luci, Bom…), difficult to imagine nowadays; the British stiff upper lip placed at the service of a hilarious version of the origins of Christianity (The Life of Brian), and once again the great Buñuel, who in his unfinished film Simón del desierto (Simon of the Desert) bravely poked fun at certain Christian myths…

A few more examples: the actor Tim Roth, in his only foray behind the camera, described a sordid case of incest in The War Zone, a film that won numerous awards at international festivals. His compatriot Stephen Frears in Prick up your ears told the disturbing story of the playwright Joe Orton, murdered by his lover… And so on, with a series of “incorrect” chronicles by great masters such as Claude Chabrol, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ulrich Seidl, Todd Solondz, David Cronenberg, Iván Zulueta, Danny Boyle, François Ozon, Lars von Trier, Alex Cox, John Waters, Dusan Makavejev, Jean Vigo, Marco Ferreri, not forgetting Laurel and Hardy with their enchanting ambiguity, and the short film Dick in which some woman relax and mischievously make fun of the male organ…

All in all, this is an extremely varied selection, that just to give us an idea, reminds us that cinema can shake off the prevailing puritanical morality and place itself in the forefront of political incorrectness.