72nd San Sebastian Festival - 20/28 September 2023
71SSIFF - 22/30 September 2023
Official
Sponsor
Sponsor
Media
Partner
Partner
Z365" or "Festival all year round" is the new strategic point of the Festival in which converge investigation, accompaniment and development of new talents (Ikusmira Berriak, Nest); training and cinematic knowledge transfer (Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola, Zinemaldia + Plus, Filmmakers' dialogue); and investigation, disclosure and cinematic thought (Z70 project, Thought and Discussion and Research and publications).
Calls for entries Log-in to MY FESTIVAL
Complete this form with your details for accessing the contents reserved for registered users.
Enter your email and press send. You will receive a link through which you can reset your password
Complete this form with your details for accessing the contents reserved for registered users.
Agenda
...
Programme and tickets 
Search 
Official Section
Films
Films
Walerian Borowczyk
France
92 min.
The original text of Ovidio -poet of the body- serves as a support as a commentary in three articulated parts and combined with the image. The first has seduction as its theme. The second teaches the way to achieve loving mastery, but above all how to retain it; the way to transform physical fury into complete and safe tenderness. The third talks about the woman, about her as her person, recognizing her right to her word, but above all to her sexuality. A film whose essential vocation is the profane and the human, but above all the language of the skin.
Diane Kurys
France
110 min.
Lena is a Jew of Russian origin, interned in a concentration camp during the occupation. To escape deportation, she marries a young Frenchman she meets in the countryside. At this very moment, in Lyon, the marriage of Madeleine and Raymond is being celebrated. His happiness will be short-lived, as he dies fighting in the resistance. Two women, two destinies that everything separates. The black years pass. Wounds, humiliation, hunger are forgotten. Lena has become a petty bourgeois and is bored. Madeleine is an artist, a brilliant woman, who dreams of going to Paris and living her life. Between the two there is a meeting that will be a little less than a passion, but a little more than a friendship.
Robert van Ackeren
Federal Republic of Germany
106 min.
Eva is a student, but without great conviction. she decides to change her life and becomes a hostess, not out of necessity but to dominate men. She knows someone who is dedicated to the same job as her. They fall in love, the conflicts begin when they decide to work together. The film is a story of obsessed love within a framework in which this is nothing but a commodity.
Opening Film
Federico Fellini
Italy
132 min.
Eve of the First World War. The "Gloria N" ocean liner departs from the port of Naples full of celebrities from the early 1900s. Aristocrats, conductors, opera singers, actors, journalists, etc. Concrete and metaphorical trip, chronicle of a funeral ceremony of a finished class that celebrates its own mundane rhythm, without noticing the disaster that is born of its indifference. Analysis of the frantic, hasty information, seen by an outdated journalist, who wraps his cynicism in alcohol, in need of a scoop. The instability, the insecurity of all the characters materializes in that rocking of the ship on the waves.
Not in competition
Eloy de la Iglesia
Spain
110 min.
In Bilbao, two young heroin addicts are friends. His parents, one is a commander of the Civil Guard and the other a Basque nationalist deputy. They must overcome their ideological differences, uniting to help them. As a backdrop to the drama, stories are produced that allow us to discover the marginal sectors of the Basque Country, hidden under a layer of puritanism and machismo and other clichés of the country. The characters in the film must choose between family and duty, the truth or the defense of loved ones. All this happens in a conflictive geographical framework such as the Basque Country at the present time.
Robert Jiras
USA
100 min.
What is real in the world of Adam Farmer, what is memory and what is fantasy? Neither Adam nor his psychiatrist can be sure of anything. He vaguely remembers an unhappy childhood, next to his parents, now missing. Memories of him are intertwined with a mysterious man who was responsible for the upheaval and disruption of his home. The truth-if it exists-comes slowly to Adam, with the help of his doctor. They work together to try to open the mists of the past.
Antonín Kachlík
Czechoslovakia
102 min.
Based on A. Fournier's novel Le Grand Meaulnes , the story is set in Bohemia, just before World War I. The protagonists are two boys, Gustov and Frantisek. One is an orphan and the other is the son of the school principal. Gustav dreams and tells his dreams to the other. They swear eternal friendship. Their encounters, their absences, their loves, their dependencies, are shown to us in an exaltation of adolescence and love. Fate will place these two young people at the limit of the line of their dreams.
Barbara Sass
Poland
92 min.
On her way out of prison, Marianna, a young woman who has lived most of her life on the margins, finds a position as a servant in a nursing home. She must take care of cleaning up a very fussy old man. Every day, upon her return home, she is confronted by her miserable neighborhood, her mother, and her disgusting lover. She wants to change her life. At the residence where she works, she meets a young nurse. Marianna desperately clings to this last chance. 1981 arrives; throughout the country the population seeks justice to bygone times. The residence is occupied by illegal tenants and problems arise. the young nurse abandons her. One night, after an argument, she kills the old man. But this was not the despicable being she thought. Marianna realizes his fatal decision and, maddened with pain, she screams like a wounded animal.
Tinto Brass
Italy
116 min.
Based on the novel by Junichiro Tazizachi. Venice, year 1940. An already mature writer and his young wife get closer through the knowledge of his private diaries, in a subtle and complete plot of provocations and deceit. An ambiguous dialogue takes place between them, in which husband and wife confess to each other. All this happens in Mussolini's fascist Venice, where the sensual, intimate, erotic and romantic climate crystallizes in a plot where passions and jealousy take on a dramatic sensual force, in an environment as degraded as the city itself. The key that hides the diary makes this knowledge possible but closes their souls to other motivations.
Alfonso Ungría
Spain
122 min.
In the second half of the s. In the 14th century, King Charles II "The Bad" from Navarre sends a company of Navarrese warriors to the other side of the Mediterranean to help his brother Luis in the conquest of Albania, since this territory belongs to him after he married Juana de Anjou. . The remoteness of the territory and the harshness of the war, together with loneliness, lead the expedition members to live immersed in extreme situations.
Jacques Nichet
France
85 min.
During the winter of 1830, a judge arrives in Saint-Girons, where he has just been appointed to that position. He arrives after a long and difficult journey, in the midst of violent peasant revolts. During the night, bands in disguise are formed, called "les demoiselles" who, dressed in women's clothes, set fires, attacking the carbonari brought by the forge masters to work. The judge will fail in his role, look for incapacity, half for lack of interest. He will end up resigning, leaving the city at the moment when a poor devil is designated as the scapegoat, sending him to Foix to be judged responsible and leader of the revolts.
Fernando Colomo
Spain
83 min.
Gustavo travels to New York driven by the desire to become an internationally famous photographer. Once in the big city, he comes into contact with the Spanish. Among his friends is Pat, a Catalan girl who studies video; Jaime, a psychoanalyst who has been living in America for 11 years. He also makes friends with native elements, such as Roy, a young writer from Alabama who divides his heart between several girls, and Thorton, a photographer's agent who tries in vain to escape our protagonist's harassment. Our man will discover everything that the great city hides under "the skyline".
Tizuka Yamasaki
Brazil
87 min.
The action takes place in Parayba, in the 1920s. Anayde, a teacher and poet, falls in love with the lawyer and journalist João, immersed in political problems. His adversary will use blackmail and make a private diary and erotic photos of the scandalous couple come to light. The scandal will drive João into exile, where she will take revenge by murdering her adversary. Crime will be the straw that leads the country to the revolutionary events of 1930. Anayde will have the courage to assume her love to the last consequences.
Pál Sándor
Hungary
87 min.
Budapest, in December 1956, at the East Station. One cold and wet morning, the crowd rushes to the train that leaves for the Austrian border. Thousands of people leave the country, all for different reasons. Gyuri Angeli is afraid; he was a private and sided with the insurgents. He is accompanied by a childhood companion, Daniel. He is not interested in politics. He is in love and his girl left the day before with her family. They are four days from the departure; four days in which political and love events take place in an atmosphere that goes from gloomy to the most exultant joy.
King Vidor
USA
98 min.
In homage to the one who was president of the jury in San Sebastián, his most eloquent silent film, illustrated by the Euskadi Orchestra, directed by Carmelo Bernaola, author of the score, and one of the leading figures in contemporary Spanish music.
Not in competition
Henri Safran
Australia
95 min.
The story of an illegitimate daughter, based on the play by Henrik Ibsen.
John G. Thomas
USA
79 min.
Casey Cain, a deaf young man, lives his solitude immersed in a silent world; His only interest is Osgood, a computer he has designed to be able to hear and speak for him. A young professor tries to help him and introduces him to an executive from a multinational to market his discovery. Casey undergoes surgery and, for the first time, is bombarded by a cacophony of sounds that are totally new to him. Gradually Marcia and Casey fall in love but the computer will not be able to solve their love problems. The boy realizes that Osgood, on whom he depends, is just a machine.
Vasilis Vafeas
Greece
75 min.
To repo is a comedy about the absurdity of everyday life in a large town like Athens. The hero is a Greek petty bourgeois, fed up with the madness of the environment, with work, with the administrative bureaucracy, and even with his house. On his day off he decides to send his car for repairs, tries to sleep with his mistress, undergoes a checkup and has to send a package abroad. In the film we see the tragic-comic situations in which he finds himself involved, we accompany him through the different offices, we attend a dinner with colleagues. Little by little we see how all the small and big personal problems are piling up, and he is transmitting them to everyone he connects with. To the point that any true relationship, with those he has by his side, ends up being totally impossible.
Miguel Hermoso
Spain
100 min.
It is the story of two criminals. One, Gonzalo, is the typical high-flying knave, accustomed to moving in high financial circles. The other, Ginés, a vulgar chorizo, quarrelsome and drunk, authentic prison meat. Both are in jail and will establish some complicity. Ginés will protect Gonzalo in the hostile environment of the prison and the latter, in return, will help the former when they come out of their confinement after serving their sentence. Their lives run parallel from that moment on in a series of vicissitudes, fruit and product of the marginalization in which both, for various reasons, live.
Antonio Giménez - Rico
Spain
96 min.
The authentic and truthful story of six real characters: Lorenzo, René, José Antonio, Paco, Juan and José, lived honestly by themselves. Sometimes dramatic, sometimes funny, almost always pathetic. And how and why they became Lorena, René, Nacha, Eva, Tamara and Josette.
Closing Film
Woody Allen
USA
79 min.
Leonard Zelig is a chameleon man. In the presence of an obese person, he gains weight; he blacks next to a black. With Eugene O'Neill he becomes a writer and a boxer when he clashes with Jack Dempsey. He changes not only his personality, but even his face and body in successive mutations, transforming himself not into another, but into anyone. The Zelig case is of great interest to scientists.
Not in competition
Official Sponsor 
Media Partner 
Official Collaborators: 
Associated Institutions:
Opening hours
Monday to Thursday: 09:00h - 15:00h
Friday: 10:00h - 14:00h
Monday to Thursday: 09:00h - 15:00h
Friday: 10:00h - 14:00h
Suscribe to our newsletter
We inform you that the personal data you provide to us on completing this form will be processed by the San Sebastian Festival as the body responsible for this website. The personal data we request will be processed for the purpose of sending you our newsletter. Authorisation to do so is given through the consent of the interested party. Only the San Sebastian Festival will send you messages and we will not disclose your data to third parties. We inform you that the data you provide to us will be stored in the Mailrelay (email marketing providers) servers, located within the EU. See the Mailrelay privacy policy. If you do not enter the data appearing as mandatory on the form, we may be unable to fulfil your request. You can exercise your rights of access, rectification, limitation and deletion of data at privacidad@sansebastianfestival.com. You can consult additional and detailed information on Data Production in our privacy policy.