72nd San Sebastian Festival - 20/28 September 2023
71SSIFF - 22/30 September 2023
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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).
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Agenda
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Ashes and Diamonds
Films
Films
Elia Kazan
USA
168 min.
America is Ithaca, a dream, the motive force in the life of the young Greek Stavros. This film is the materialisation of a struggle to achieve an ideal, a myth: America.The action begins in Turkey, in 1896, and ends in New York, when a boat ties up and a young man juntos to shore, falls on his hands and knewws and kisses the ground. Between the two points is the journey: love and disappointments, friendship and work, and all of those situations through wich we must live, as human beings, when we want something.
Louis King
USA
79 min.
Based on the work of Enrique Jardiel Poncela. Made in Hollywood studios during the Spanish Civil War. They were some of his interpreters, a group of Spanish republicans.
Special Screenings
Vittorio de Seta
Italy
102 min.
Vittorio de Seta tries to show that Fate has no divine origin, as expressed in classical tragedy. Behind adverse conditions there is, many times, a social and political system whose administrative authority maintains the poverty of some in the name of the property rights of a few. And, for this reason, it only offers to the most humble one valid intermediary: the police. To this legalised contempt, the property-less shepherds can only opose the pride of the 'outlaw'. Violence is the operating principle.
Ray Satyajit
India
117 min.
Calcutta, 1879. Bhupati Dutt, a wealthy intellectual publishes a small weekly in English, a task which absorbs most of his interest. He lives with Charulata, his wife, who, ignored by Bhupati, gets involved in expanding her imagination by reading Bengali novels. There is a young man who also lives with the couple, Amal. Charulata falls in love with him. Neither Amal nor the husband are aware of this. Even Charulata is unconscious of this love that grows within her without her knowing how or why.
Roman Polanski
United Kingdom
111 min.
An excentric couple, inhabitants of a castle on the English coast, see their ridiculous existence disturberd by the appearance of a gangster on the run who expects their help. As the film proceeds, the absurdity grows, to the point where the situation is highly unlikely and the tension is unbearable.
Jerzy Skolimowski
United Kingdom - Federal Republic of Germany
92 min.
Skolimowski portrays in this film an atmosphere dominated by sex; that is to say, by repression and the industry built up around it. The characters, possessed of a "standard" psychology, are the victims and at the same time the promoters of their situation. Like the protagonist, a boy of 15, shy, virginal and inexpert, who falls in love with his co-worker at a public bath house, a dark and gloomy place. She, for her part, spends her free time going between this boyfriend and her official fiance, trying desperately to take advantage of the few possibilities of fulfilment that life offer her. Mike begins a feverish pursuit of the girl, trying to locate her everywhere, hoping to have with her his first sexual experience. Behind this sordid game there is a masturbatory and impotent dread, until in the end she dies as a consequence of an accident which he provokes, following the first, frustrated experience.
Glauber Rocha
Brazil
110 min.
A film based upon actual events. Scenario: Brazil. A singer accompanies the acts of the hero, Manuel, a man who lives in the 'sertao' of Brazil in miserable conditions. One day he rises up against the owner of the place, kills him and flees. (The directorr has asserted, on a certain occasion, that the mos authentic act of man is violence). In the 'sertao', full of sun and misery, strange prophets appear who invoke the saints and promise that the calcified flatland will be transformed into sea. Manuel finds one of these prophets and comes to believe in him, then is submitted to the most harrowing trials in hallucinatory ceremonies. The authorities, concerned about this prophet Sebastián, hire Antonio das Mortes, a professional killer, to murder him. Antonio raids the prophet's sanctuary, killing his followers. Manuel and his wife, the sole survivors, manage to flee and they meet up with another 'cangaceiro' whoe believes hilmself to be the reincarnation of Saint George and sees the solution to the misery of the 'sertao' in the death of all of its inhabitants. Manuel goes into his service, hoping to be saved. Antonio das Mortes finds this new prophet and does away with him and his followers. Manuel and his wife escape and flee inthe direction of the sea.
Alexander Kluge
Federal Republic of Germany
104 min.
Leni Peickert is the daugther of a circus performer who has lost his life to his work. She wishes to create a circus where wild animals appear in an authentic way, untamed, not like human beings in disguise. The performers, likewise, should present their acts not as something magic but by explaining them according to physical laws. She needs money, but miraculosly receives an inheritance left her by a girlfriend. Leni learns a great deal along the way and the circus serves to amplify her professional horizons and personal ambitions.
Marco Ferreri
Spain
87 min.
A fairly authentic picture of Madrid low-life. the naturalistic style of the woek is slightly lessened by the black humor implanted by its makers. The fact that this film has been said to give a simplistic and contemptous view of human reality cannot take away form its having considerable success among the public and among independent critics at the time of its Spanish premiere. The film is in the tradition of Italian neorealism.
Guillermo Fernandez Jurado, Rodolfo Corral
Argentina
Short film
El tango en el cine (The Tango in the Movies) is the first compilation of most of the scenes containing this musical form in the world cinema. So that there are scenes like that of some midgets in The Stike by Sergei Eisenstein who do tango steps, as also do couples like Laurel and Hardy, and Gloria Swanson and William Holden. At a strictly Argentine level, there are Carlos Gardel and Hugo del Carril, Alippi, Parravicini and Tito Luisardo; Sofía Bozán, in scenes form Luces de Buenos Aires and Carnaval de Antaño; Libertad, Tita, Tania and Azucena Maizini with La canción de Buenos Aires, Gardel and Del Carril in Volver, or scenes from Hasta el último tren, by Jorge Sobral. And there is a lot more: the tango in Paris, nights in Buenos Aires, parents and children, the background orchestras and all of those people of the 30's who were tango-lovers and lovers of the night no matter where they were.
Alberto Isaac
Mexico
90 min.
Dámaso is almost a tramp. He lives ni a small village, does not work and is supported by his pregnant wife, who is older than he is. One night, Dámaso steals three billiard balls, yet charges are made against a foreigner. Though feeling safe, Dámaso realizes that since the owner will never buy new balls, the village has grown ever more boring. So he decides to put them back without anybody noticing it. And what was only just mischief becomes a heroic deed.
Adolfas Mekas
USA
88 min.
Jack and Leo are two youngsters in love with Vera. For seven long winters they camp in a snowy wood in Vermont, next to her place, doing all sorts of foolish things and aping gestures and attitudes seen in movies, to seduce her. They are both convinced that Vera will eventually marry one of them. Gideon, another friend of Vera, is the typical movie villain. And just as if it were a movie, the two youngsters go through crazy and wild adventures in the snow.
Marco Bellocchio
Italy
105 min.
A film which is part of the Italian tradition of social criticism through the cinema. It can be said to deal with a settling of accounts among bourgeois adolescents. The protagonist, Alessandro, goaded by youthful restlesness, tries to grow up in a ferocious and meticulously planned act of revolt. He is desperate but lucid. Exasperation is the central emotion of this film which, according to Bellochio himself, enabled him, like the rest of his work, to treat "a problem of personal concern".
Ermanno Olmi
Italy
105 min.
A young man finds a job in a large Milanese organisation. Hardly anything happens, except for the small daily incidents that are caught with such precision that the most common getures can provoke emotion or laugther.
Dino Risi
Italy
105 min.
Roberto is a Law student who deeply believes in life and solidarity. He comes to know Bruno, a wide boy, who will entince him and teach him an easy way of life. And Roberto will gradually devote himself to the most frivolous hedonism, always surrounded by rapturous women.
Peter Fleischmann
Federal Republic of Germany
90 min.
Hunting scenes, but a manhunt. The peaceful inhabitants of a mountain village struggle to capture a boy, different from the others, without a doubt impotent and perhaps homosexual, who kills the village slut during the madness of the chase. When the boy goes down, a rousing beer fest is held. We are definitely dealing here with a case of ordinary fascism, even cruel-seeming when seen combined with an almost complicitous observation of everyday life.
Joseph Losey
United Kingdom
86 min.
King and Country narrates the story of a desertion during the First World War. We see how the military high staff, meeting in a barracoon near the front lines, fails to understand the sacrifices made by a soldier three years in the trenches, obliged to watch his comrades die ony by one with fear griping his insides, surrounded by filth and a long way form his loved ones. The English soldier speaks of all of this, and does it with such sincerity that he impresses Captain Hagreaves, who pleads for mercy towards the accused. But the High Staff, in its inflexibility, finds the soldier guilty; he is condemned to be shot at 5:30 in the morning as his batallion moves off to the front again.
Michelangelo Antonioni
Italy - France
145 min.
L'avventura is, like almost all of Antonioni's films, a world of impossible relationships. Antonioni sees human beings as inevitably separated from others. For this reason the complete fusion ot two individuals is impossible.The failure of communication in the film reaches the higest of levels. Part of this is reflected in the relationship of Ana with her father, where the generational break is obvious. Ana is seen meeting her friend Claudia. After a time both declare the non existence of some point of contact between them through wich they can communicate. Their separation accenturates itself during the course of a cruise. Ana is lost on a rocky isle and no one can find her. During the ever more anguished search, almost all fo the characters gradually forbet about Ana, except Claudia and Sandro, Ana's fiancé. The two latter continue the search and wind up falling in love, but not even this love will reach any sort of perfection. Between two individuals an abyss always opens.
Tomás Gutiérrez Alea
Cuba
84 min.
The hero of the film is an exemplary proletarian, a very good man, Francisco J. Pérez. He has devoted his whole life to work. First, he used to carve busts and effigies. Then, once he has grown old, he devises a machine to make busts in series. Finally, he dies: his fellow workers pay him a last tribute, the boss delivers a flowery speech in front of his grave and, twenty-four hours later, his widow is taking all the necessary steos to obtain a pension for The Death of a Bureaucrat.
Milos Forman
Czechoslovakia
82 min.
The erotic adventures of a girl of sixteen. She lives in a small city where an army camp has just been set up, a thing which convulses the female population. At a dance, several older but awkward soldiers ask the girls to dance and to drink. We see the false "men-of-the-world" posturing of the men, who are even less bold than the girls. Unexpectedly, at the night's end, the party breaks up and one of the girls goes off with a very young piano player form the orchestra. When a few days have passed, she decides to move to Praga so that -as he has suggested- she can live with her new lover. The girl's arrival at the pianist's house will provoke a reaction very different from what the girl expected.
Louis Malle
France
121 min.
The film tells the story of the last days of Alain Leroy, an alcoholic who takes his own life. The use of fascinating music of Erik Satie underlines the tragic and inexorable progression of Alain towards death.
Jacques Demy
France
90 min.
Roland is a young dreamer, a studious individual who wishes to give some meaning to his life. In the course of the same day he meets Frankie, a sailor; Cécile, a teenage girl who reminds him of a childhood love, and Lola.The latter, a ballerina and mother of a son, represents his ideal woman. Lola talks to him of her love to Michel, the father of the child who seven years earlier left to seek his fortune. It is now when Roland believes he has found his reason for living. But this concrete circumstances slips away, vanishing s if it had been a dream.
Carlos Saura
Spain
88 min.
Los golfos (The Bums) are five boys in a bad neighbourhood in Madrid who find in the triumph of one of them as a bullfigther a way out of this world holding no better future than jail time, at the worst, or a few pennies for an occasional drink, if they are lucky. So we see as the matador's aprentice works in his spare time at the fruit and vegetable market. Visi, a girl, friend of the group, is a hooker, and the others are preparing a theft of some truck tools to later sell them at the flea market. The film shows intelligently the relationship existing between conditions of oppression and poverty and bull fighting.
Jirí Menzel
Czechoslovakia
92 min.
The action takes place during Second World War. A young man who works as a railway station employee worries more about his sexual shyness that about the war. After making love for the first time with a young Partisan girl, he blows up a German ammunition train. The film is a moving and funny portrayal of the transition form adolescence to virility. This film won the Oscar for the Best Foreign Film of 1967.
Andrej Munk, Witold Lesiewicz (finalizado por)
Poland
81 min.
An unfinished masterpiece, Munk having died in an accident during filming. The action centers around a woman who belonged to Hitler's SS. This woman remembers a woman prisoner and the time that she helped to run a death camp.
Andrzej Wajda
Poland
107 min.
1945. The last day of the war in a provincial city. A right-wing organisation assigns to a young man the mission of assesinating the local communist chief. They young man seects the wrong victim and waits in an inn where a party is going on. Ligths and ruins create and unreal atmosphere, full of forewarnings and remembrances: the war and the hope of a better world. Ashes and diamonds. The young man falls in love with a maid at the party and finally does kill the communist leader. He is pursued and killed. "The past and the future", Wajda says of his film, "sit down at the same table to the tune of the tango and the fox-trot. The hero must resolve the eternal dilemma of the soldier: obey or think.Yet he kills before surrendering his arms, as the representative of a generation that counted on nothing but itself and a hidden revolver. I wished to show", concludes the director, "the difficult and complex universe of a generations like mine".
Wojciech Has
Poland
180 min.
Young Alphonse von Worden, a captain in the Waloon Guards of the King of Spain, crosses the abruptly-rising mountains of the Sierra Morena. One night he stops to rest in an inn where he meets two Moorish princesses who reveal to him a secret: he descends from a powerful Moorish family and his destiny is to perform great deeds. But before then he must go through a series of trials to prove his valour, honesty and honor. It is in this way that von Worden will become a witness to and hero of extraordinary events. He will be pursuede by ghosts, by the devil-possesses, by the devil himself and even by the Inquisition.
Luis Buñuel
Mexico
89 min.
After the shipwreck of his ship, Robinson Crusoe finds an island, apparently deserted and organizes to survive. He settles in a grotto and with the elements of the island, he prepares bread and wine. After a while, he finds an indigenous man whom he saves from being gobbled up by his fellow tribesmen, and makes him his servant. After christening him Friday, he begins to educate him with all the elements of Western culture.
Leonardo Favio
Argentina
63 min.
The title sounds like a tango. To a certain extent, it is an anti-tango film since the hero is a poor fellow who lives on the victories achieved by his figthing-cock, a poor guy who falls in love with Francisca and takes her to his place. The only trouble is that he falls in love with yet another one. And for the sake of this second mistress, Aniceto sells his cock. But when he decides to get it back, he is shot to death in a farmyard.
Yasujirô Ozu
Japan
120 min.
Sanma no aji is the last film of the great director Yasujirô Ozu, who died at the age of 60. It is the story of a sake drinker, and has as its backdrop the Tokyo of 1962, admirably captured by the "cameras" of Ozu. The colors used in the photography give significance to neon lights that goes beyond their everyday banality.
John Cassavetes
USA
81 min.
A black girl who has managed to "pass for white" and be treated like one, is freatly humillated when her first love, because of her race, cannot repress certain feelings of revulsion towards her. The makers of the film show racist feelings to be a negative aspect of human behaviour but without moralising to the viewer. So that attitude of revulsion felt by the leading character is shown as a reaction which the man could have felt with regard to a completely different problem.
Hiroshi Teshigahara
Japan
115 min.
A susprising parable about modern life and one of the most representative films of the Japanese "new Wave". The action revolves around a man from the city who loses himself among sand dunes wit a woman who helps him to clean the sand of its litter. She has his son and leaves the dunes, while he stays behind to live in solitude.
Miklos Jancsó
Hungary
95 min.
The action takes place when Hungary is under Austrian rule. It is 1969. A large group of peasants are concentrated in a fort to try to locate the maquis among them and especially their boss, Sandor. Once the first "guilty" has been denounced by a woman, a tragic game is unleashed in which each accused man, if he wants to save himself, will have to denounce someone who is more guilty than him. A climate of unbearable tension, heading towards the most absolute baseness, is created in the field. However, the prisoners manage to overcome it, although this will not do them much good, since amnesty will only be offered to them on the condition that they enroll in the Imperial Army.
Tony Richardson
United Kingdom
99 min.
This film, which has an alternative title, Rebel With a Cause, is not far, thematicalle, from that other film of a similar title starring James Dean. The family conflict in a working class setting, and the rebelliousness of a young man who goes from robbery to reformatory, form the basis of the plot. The young man, Colin, will stand out in the institution for his endurance in long-distance races, which get the attention of the director who insists on training him for competition. As he trains, he sees flashbacks of his life. He sees his girlfriend and his best friend. There is also his father, who dies of cancer, and his mother who tries to overcome the insecurity experienced with his father by having an affair with another man. The day of the race arrives. Colin leads the field. He is about to cross the finish line. But he stops and looks up into the stands with disdain at the recorm school Director there, who cannot understand why...
Arthur Penn
USA
106 min.
Anie Sullivan arrives at the home of the Kellers to teach Helen, a dreaf dumb and blind girl of seven, to make her way in life. Helen's parents think there is no hope for their child. Spoiled and undisciplined, she makes Annie's task unmanageable. To obtain better results the teacher asks that a garden house be fixed up so she can use it to be alone with the child. There two weeks pass without any success in overcoming Helen's stubborness. After many difficulties, Annie sees her efforts rewarded when, back again with the family, the little girl has clearly opened up to Annie's knowledge and warmth.
John Huston
USA
78 min.
Stephen Crane's novel, the basis of the film, is about fear. Or, perhaps, about the fear of fear. Thus its concern with events that take place in 1862, during the American Civil War. A young soldier deserts during a battle and later says he was fighting with another unit. In the end he confesses to a friend and winds up conducting himself heroically.
Luis Alcoriza
Mexico
95 min.
A film that has as its leading character a precise and biting irony, that denounces the capitalist system in Mexico. It speaks of explotation and misery and attempts to break down the key symbols of that society: the clergy and the good life. Throughout the film, and under the clear influence of Buñuel, we see a parade of frightful images which have frequently been called "very strong stuff": the blind man, the Virgin, the miracle, pigs, love scenes in a river, the lonely man who lives watching a girl, the problem of the men of the countryside in that Mexico that is so similar to Spain...
Robert Bresson
France
105 min.
A woman has just committed suicide. In front of their old servant, her husaband remembers their life together. He feels "he did everything for her". Yet, gradually, doubts arise and, then, anguish. Was there really no possibility to go on living?
Jean-Luc Godard
France
85 min.
Unable to make it unitl the end of the month, a young girl goes into prostitution with fatal results. As in many other film by Jean-Luc Godard, prostitution is used as a metaphor for bourgeois society.
Michael Wadleigh
USA
187 min.
The film record of the famous pop music concert held near New York, attended by approximately a half-million people, which was able to perfectly bring to life there "beautiful people" and their attitude towards life. The more than one hundred hours of footage shot by thirty cameramen were later reduced to three hours for the film.
Louis Malle
France
92 min.
Zazie, a ten-year-old from the provinces, goes to Parist to spend a few days of holiday at the home of her uncle. From the Metro window many things can be seen: the Flea Market, the traffic in the streets, the Eiffel Tower, a cabaret...Louis Malle has said: "I would hope that this seemingly comic film might convey, to begin with, the difficulty of man's living in a city in the Western world in the 20th Century. Queneau, in his novel, employs form to destroy meaning. We have tried to find and equivalent for both in an attempt to arrive at an internal criticism of cinema language. Queneau's novel is difficult to adapt because it moves from verbal comedy to visual comedy and back". Louis Malle is here represented by his best film, without a doubt. Its interest lies in certain allusions to other films, to literature, to private games. And all of it is mixed up in a premeditated disorder to satirise the demented life of Paris, as well as war and fascism.
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