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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Films
Films
Patrice Chereau
France - UK - Germany - Spain
119 min.
She visits him every Wednesday afternoon with the sole purpose of sex. The taxi waits for her outside. They talk about nothing in particular. The following week at the same time she knocks on the door again. They undress and give in to their passion. He has no idea where she comes from; as soon as she arrives, he takes her straight down into the basement, where he has covered the carpet with blankets and sheets. It's a room where anything goes. If sex is part of getting to know people, what does he know about her? One day he decides to follow her; but, although he does in fact discover things about her life, it also looks as if things are not going to go quite as smoothly from now on.
Manoel de Oliveira
France - Portugal
90 min.
Gilbert Valence is a theatre actor. Talent and a long career have landed him a number of brilliant parts. But one afternoon right after the show, tragedy enters his life: his agent and old friend Georges tells him that his wife, his daughter and his son-in-law have just died in a car crash. Gilbert starts sharing his time between the grandson he adores and the theatre. Although the young actress with whom he works is smitten by him, his heart is in no state for adventure; but he does accept the proposal of an American director to work on an adaptation of Joyce's Ulysses. The text is short, but so is the amount of time he has to memorize it in English.
Giuseppe Bertolucci
Italy
107 min.
Highly intrigued by one of her teacher's lessons according to which you have to know how to lie, a young drama student, Sofia, decides to experiment with her talent in real life. But her lies ultimately uncover a bitter truth: her boyfriend and best mate are lovers. She therefore decides to tell the truth and nothing but the truth from then on. After a brief encounter with a fifty-year-old train ticket inspector, she stays faithful to her undertaking by proceeding to tell his wife what has happened. Tormented by guilt at what she has done, Sofia makes her way to Rome to participate in a casting, learning at the hands of an actress that acting is neither lying nor telling the truth, but simply creating an illusion, an illusion which somehow comes true when Sofia meets Gerard, the young French director with whom fate seems determined to unite her.
Laurent Cantet
France
Things seem to be going fine for Vincent: business trips, meetings, a wife and three kids. But his professional life is in fact nothing but a web of lies. He has been unable to tell his family and friends that he's been fired and has no option but to invent a prestigious new job for himself in Geneva. To maintain his lost income, he desperately betrays the friends who trust him with their money. All Vincent ever wanted was to call time out from a suffocating professional life without affecting his family. But now the ever-growing tension of his world is rapidly closing in.
François Dupeyron
France
135 min.
Early August 1914. A young and handsome lieutenant, Adrien, rides out on a reconnaissance mission. A shell explodes... The war takes on another aspect for him from then on: the Val de Grâce hospital, the officers' room, a mirrorless space where everyone looks into everyone else's eyes. Five years on hold. Five years in which to make friends for life. Five years to prepare for the future, for life...
Lucrecia Martel
Argentina
102 min.
February in the northwest of Argentina. The sun cracks the earth and the tropical rains create swamps that are a hotbed for vermin. The 50-something-year-old Mecha is spending her summer at the ?La Mandragora? estate with her four kids and a husband who dyes his hair. Nothing that a few drinks can't cure. As Tali would put it, the alcohol comes in one door but never goes out the other. Tali, Mecha's cousin, lives in La Ciénaga, the closest town to the estate. She also has four children and a husband who loves his house and hunting. Two accidents reunite the two families at La Mandragora, where they will attempt to survive a summer from hell.
Michael Haneke
France
130 min.
Erika Kohut is a piano teacher at the Vienna Conservatoire. Just turned forty, she lives with her mother, from whose suffocating influence she regularly escapes in order to go to porno cinemas and shows. Her sexuality consists of a morbid ?voyeurism? and the occasional urge for masochistic self-mutililation. Erika and life follow different paths. Until, one day, one of her students decide to seduce her.
Nanni Moretti
Italy
100 min.
Giovanni, Paola and their two teenage children, the elder Irene and her young brother Andrea, form a united family living in a small town in Northern Italy. Giovanni is a psychoanalyst. Patients come to the surgery next door to his home and confide their neuroses to him, a contrast with his own life of ingrained habits like reading, listening to music or running through the city to the point of exhaustion. One Sunday morning, having to attend an urgent call from a patient spoils his plans of a run with Andrea and the boy sets off with some friends on a diving trip from which he will never return.
Jean-Pierre Jeunet
France
120 min.
Amelie isn't like the others. She has seen her goldfish disappear down a drain, her mother dying beside Notre-Dame and her father lavish love on a garden gnome. Now a grown woman, she works as a waitress in a Montmartre bar. She leads a simple life: she likes throwing stones into the St. Martin Canal, observing people and letting her imagination fly. Suddenly, at 22, Amelie discovers her mission in life: to straighten out the mess in other people's lives without them noticing. But her vocation is transformed with the arrival of the mysterious unshod Nino. Captivated by the boy, Amelie prefers to tease him for a while before allowing herself to be discovered. Luckily, the brittle-boned neighbour whom Amelie has attempted to help pays her back in kind by pushing her into Nino's arms.
Ferzan Ozpetek
Italy
105 min.
Antonia and Massimo have been married for ten years. They live happily in a pretty house in a residential estate on the outskirts of Rome. Massimo's sudden death in a car accident throws Antonia into the depths of depression: she doesn't go to work, she doesn't go out with her friends and she ends up sinking into total seclusion. Until she discovers that Massimo has been seeing someone else for the last seven years. Coming out of her isolation to find the person in question, Antonia discovers that her rival was not a woman, but a man. Although the pair of them start by arguing with one another, they also feel a sort of mutual attraction: after all, they were both in love with the same man.
Danis Tanovic
Bosnia and Herzegovina - France - Slovenia - Italy - UK - Belgium
98 min.
This is the story of two soldiers, Ciki and Nino, one Bosnian and the other Serbian, trapped between enemy lines in ?no man's land? during the 1993 Bosnia war. While Ciki and Nino try to find a way out of their complicated problem, a UN peace-keeping sergeant prepares to help them, despite his superiors' orders to the contrary. The media take charge of converting a simple anecdote into an international media event. Tension grows between those involved and the press patiently waits for new information, while Nino and Ciki try to negotiate the price of their own lives amid the madness of war.
Wang Xiaoshuai
113 min.
Having left his village for Beijing with great expectations, it nevertheless takes some time for Guei to find himself a job as a bicycle courier, earning ten yuan for each trip. If he manages to save 600 yuan, he will be able to buy the silver mountain bike that is his pride and joy. One day, just as he is about to finish paying off the money, he discovers to his horror that the bike has disappeared. Guei scours half the city for it and is just about to give up all hope when he spots a young man riding it down the street. Stopping the man, Guei learns that he has bought the bike at a flea market. But Guei needs the transport desperately. There's nothing for it, they'll have to share.
Todd Solondz
USA
83 min.
Storytelling comprises two separate stories set against the college and high school terrain. Following the paths of its young characters, it explores issues of sex, race, celebrity and exploitation. The first part, Fiction, traces the complicated relationships between three students and their creative writing professor, professionally unsatisfied despite his Putlitzer Prize. In the second part, Non-Fiction, a filmmaker persuades a job-seeking high school senior and his family to become the subjects of a documentary.
Joel Coen
USA - UK
A tale of passion, crime and punishment in the summer of 1949. Ed Crane, a barber in a small northern California town, is dissatisfied with his life. His wife Doris' infidelity presents him with an opportunity for blackmail that he thinks will help him to change it. However, Ed's scheme lays bare even darker secrets before leading to murder.
Clare Peploe
Italy - UK - Germany
107 min.
In a speeding horse-drawn carriage, two young women disguise themselves as men. This the Princess and Corine, her lady-in-waiting. The Princess has inherited a throne usurped by her father, which rightfully belongs to Prince Agis with whom she's fallen in love. She schemes to conquer the young man's heart, then marry him and give back the throne. She knows she must be cunning, for Agis has been raised to hate her. Since birth he has been under the protection of the philosopher Hermocrates and his spinster sister Leontine. To win the man she desires, the Princess must boldly seduce both the philosopher and his sister, to do which she finds herself continuously pivoting between personalities.
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