Four burgeoning Latin American auteurs – Argentina’s Pablo Fendrik and Emiliano Torres, Guatemala’s Jayro Bustamante and Chile’s Pepa San Martín– will present new movie projects at San Sebastian’s 7th Europe-Latin America Co-production Forum.

Project screenplays still have to be read. Lent edge, however, by the presence of titles from nine women, including two of Catalonia’s most exciting young female cineasts, Meritxell Colell and Clara Roquet, the Forum competition will also welcome some of the producer movers and shakers on Ibero-America’s arthouse scene: Brazil’s Dezenove, Argentina’s Rei Cine and Varsovia Films, Spain’s Avalon and Lastor Media.

Add to that mix two players on three ever more ambitious film hubs –the Basque Country’s Gariza Films, Switzerland’s Matthias Huser and Moroco Alfredo Colman at Argentina second-city Cordoba– and the line-up of projects at this year’s Forum looks on paper at least like, arguably, the strongest since the event launched in 2012.

Hermano Peligro weighs in as a potentially propulsive Patagonia-set revenge-survival thriller, produced by Benjamin Domenech, Santiago Gallelli, and Matías Roveda at Buenos Aires-based Rei Cine, behind Lucrecia Martel’s Zama and Copenhagen’s Snowglobe.

Bustamante’s follow-up to his Berlin Silver Bear-winning debut Ixcanul, La Llorona (The Weeping Woman) stars Ixcanul leads Maria Mercedes Caroy and María Telón in a movie taking as a backdrop the mass killings of Maya civilians during the Guatemalan Civil War (1960-1996).

Produced again by Macarena López at Chile’s Manufactura de Películas, San Martin’s La Felicidad (Happiness) turns on the relationship of Ana, a 65-year-old woman, and friend Teresa, reflecting on “solitude and friendship − and on how we try to build our happiness.”

Marea (Tide) marks Argentine Torres’ follow-up to El Invierno, a Special Jury Award and best photography at the 2016 San Sebastián Festival. Produced by Argentina’s Gaman Cine, Tide is a more ambitious project than Invierno, Torres said. Its story follows a sick Spanish sailor and Argentine captain on board a fishing boat in the South Atlantic.

In all, 10 of the Co-production Forum’s 16 competing projects are set to be directed by women, the first time in memory any San Sebastian section has had a majority women presence, and its major industry section at that. They suggest exciting sense of generation renewal, in young women directors in Catalonia, Mexico and Chile, for instance.

Meritxell Colell forms part of a young generation of Catalan directors whose debuts are galvanizing its moviemaking sector. A Latin America-set road-movie produced by Barcelona’s Polar Star Films, Duo, also at the Forum, marks writer-director Colell’s return, teaming with the same co-producers –Argentina’s Pensilvania, France’s Paraiso– and lead actress (Mónica García) as her acclaimed docu-fiction Facing the Wind, a 2018 Berlin Forum entry. Chile’s Manufactura de Películas is also on board.

A co-scribe on SXSW best actors winner 10,000 Km and Petra, admired at this year’s Directors’ Fortnight, Clara Roquet’s Libertad, is the awaited helming feature debut of screenwriter Roquet, about a girl forced to come of age by her maid’s wild teen daughter. Madrid-based Avalon produces with Lastor Media (“Anchor and Hope”) and Snowglobe.

Defined by first timer Paula Un Mi Kim as a film about existential crisis, Diário de Viagem is produced by Sara Silveira at Sao Paulo’s Dezenove Som e Imagens, a famed supporter of new talent, teaming with Sam Ka Pur Filmes. Pandora Films will distribute the film in Brazil. The film’s star is Valentina Schulz, a teen actress and influencer, and former Masterchef Junior contestant. Diário de Viagem has 70% of the financing secured, looking at San Sebastián to tie down U.K. co-production and world sales.

JOHN HOPEWELL EMILIANO DE PABLOS