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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Films
Films
Kim Ki-duk
South Korea - Germany
103 min.
Nobody escapes the changes in the seasons which give rhythm to our existence, from birth to death; not even the two monks who share their hermitage isolated in the mountains. Under the sharp eyes of the older monk, the younger one experiences the seasons. Spring: a child monk laughs as he watches a frog trying to get rid of a stone on its back. He laughs less when the same fate is inflicted on him as punishment by the old monk. Summer: the young monk is now 17, and experiences his first feelings of love with the arrival of a young, convalescent girl who has come to rest. Autumn: in his 30s and back at the hermitage, the old monk whips him when he tries to commit suicide in front of Buddha's statue. Winter: now in his mature years, the monk returns to the hermitage, no longer inhabited. A pregnant woman arrives. Spring: the old monk converses with nature. Nearby, a child monk plays...
Hector Babenco
Brasil - Argentina - Italia
152 min.
Carandiru prison, São Paulo, the biggest in Latin America. A famous doctor lands in a desperately overpopulated, appalling environment to implement an AIDS prevention programme. Accustomed to top-notch medicine, he has to learn to use his instinct to get by. He gradually gets to know the prisoners, their worlds, their humanity and their fabulous desire to live. He earns their respect and shares their secrets. His view reveals the social tragedy of a country, a tragedy which on 2 October 1992 culminated with the terrible Carandiru massacre.
Michael Winterbottom
Erresuma Batua
88 min.
Afghan refugees Enayatullah and Jamal live in Shamshatoo camp, on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The former's uncle decides to pay for their passage from there to London and a cousin. Travelling on ramshackle buses and lorries and always paying backhanders up front, Enayatullah and Jamal learn what hell really means during their dangerous flight.
Claude Chabrol Chabrol
Frantzia
104 min.
If time exists, can guilt be handed down from generation to generation like a genetic illness? What are the potential consequences of a non-expiated error in the guilty party and in his or her descendents and family members? At the end of WWII, in the lethal environment of settling collaboration-related scores, a woman is absolved of a crime she did in fact commit. The movie is set in the present day, during the last local elections, when another crime is committed. Who is guilty? The person who committed the crime or the person who accuses him or herself of having committed it? And of what is he or she guilty? And what if time doesn't exist...
James Ivory
AEB
117 min.
Isabel Walker goes to Paris to be with and comfort her sister Roxeanna, who is pregnant and has been left by her husband, Charles-Henry de Persand, while affronting her ?divorce?. But Isabel falls in love with a French diplomat who turns out to be Roxeanne's future ex-husband's uncle. This creates a scandal and the relationships within the family become even more complicated, until a passionate crime upsets everything.
Christoffer Boe
Danimarka
91 min.
In Copenhagen for her husband August's book launch, Aimee takes to the streets alone. After dinner, Alex and his girlfriend Simone are heading home. As he waits for Simone in a crowded station, Alex catches his first glimpse of Aimee on the platform. Seeing her again on the train, he impulsively rushes after her, leaving Simone with no explanation. Aimee leads him through the streets into a bar, where they strike up a conversation as naturally as if they were already acquainted. Falling in love in a heartbeat, Alex returns to the hotel with her. The following morning Alex and Aimee wake together and make plans to meet later in the day. But Alex's life has changed overnight: his flat is no longer where it was, his friends don't recognize him, and worse still, seeing Simone in the street, she claims not to know who he is. Alex races through the city to meet Aimee, hoping that she at least will prove to be real...
Patrice Chéreau
Frantzia
95 min.
Thomas is dying. He accepts it. He's chosen to await his death here, in this house by the sea, the house of his childhood. I'm with him. It's still summer. I never realized people could die in the summer. I thought death was something that always happened in winter, that it needed the cold, gray skies and bleakness. But I realize it can also do its deed in the sun, in broad daylight. I think that Thomas will welcome it in the broad daylight. This winter, when he was hospitalized, I thought it would begin with a numbness in his arms and legs, that he'd have some kind of contraction, and then there would be an emergency, something sudden, something brutal. But not at all: instead there's a nonchalance, a kind of emptiness, a sluggishness, a renunciation under the summer heat. Still, this foreseeable, expected death will bring about a cataclysm. It will affect all of our lives. It will modify them, force them into a new, unexpected direction. This death will be the most important death. My brother is dying.
François Ozon
Frantzia
102 min.
Sarah Morton, an English author of best-selling detective stories, travels to the French region of Lubéron to rest and write at her editor's home. But the arrival at the house one night of her editor's French daughter Julie soon puts paid to her peace and quiet.
Bernardo Bertolucci
Erresuma Batua - Frantzia - Italia
130 min.
Isabelle and her twin brother Theo, alone in Paris while their parents are away, invite a young American boy they meet at the cinema to their apartment. The three close themselves in, establish rules of behaviour and explore their emotions and eroticism to the extreme. Meanwhile, in the street, May ?68 and its related events are underway, eventually sweeping along the three youngsters despite their apparent lack of implication. The movie narrates the process of their sexual liberation and its transfer to the social concerns of the time.
Robert Benton Benton
AEB - Alemania - Frantzia
120 min.
The Human Stain is based on the novel by author Philip Roth, winner of the Pulitzer prize, set in 1998, when the USA was immersed in the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. This is the tale of Coleman Silk, a master of deceipt and even reinvention throughout his life. While he was a promising university student, Coleman's first love Steena had destroyed herself for a secret. Years later, having become a prestigious professor, his career is ruined by false accusations. Now, caught up in a scandalous relationship with the mysterious Faunia, Coleman experiences erotic awakenings taking him back into the past. But with his resuscitated passion comes the threat of Faunia's ex-husband, obliging Coleman to show his real identity before it's too late.
Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Turkia
110 min.
A photographer haunted by the feeling that the gap between his life and his ideals is growing finds himself obliged to put up in his Istanbul apartment a young relative who has left behind his village looking for a job aboard a ship to take him abroad.
Zhang Yimou
Txina - Hong Kong
98 min.
Towards the end of its Warring States period (481-221 BC), China was divided into seven separate kingdoms which each fought ruthlessly for supremacy over the others. Qin, King of the Northern province, had long been the target of assassins and had promised all kinds of recompense to the person who defeated his worst enemies: the warriors Broken Sword, Flying Snow and Sky. Ten years later, Nameless, an enigmatic county sheriff, comes to Qin bearing the weapons of the slain assassins, giving a detailed account of how he came by them. But the King has his own version of the events... Nothing is as simple as it seems in a story mixing love, honour and duty and which, finally, tells us about what it's like to be a hero.
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Friday: 10:00h - 14:00h
Monday to Thursday: 09:00h - 15:00h
Friday: 10:00h - 14:00h
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