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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Programme and tickets 
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New Directors
Films
Films
Goran Rebic
Austria
90 min.
This poetical ship-movie takes us down one of the most important European rivers in history, the Danube. The vessel, the ?Donau? - a pile of scrap iron - and its solitary captain, Franz, are making their final voyage when a youngster coming on board with a coffin and the last wishes of a dead woman force him to make his way down the Danube from Vienna. Carrying a handful of passengers, the ship sails 2,000 kilometres towards the East and a new home.
Patxi Barco
Espainia
85 min.
Raquel is struggling to rebuild her life after her husband's death in an accident. An employee in a newspaper infography department, she is given the job of reproducing the details of a multiple murder committed five years previously. Given that the accident and the crime had taken place on the same night, the job obliges her to relive her tragical experience. The suspicion that both occurrences are related lead her to believe that the key to the whole thing is in her mind, giving her a permanent feeling of unease. Meanwhile, Ismael, condemned for having participated in the multiple crime, is let out of prison on probation.
Víctor Arregui
Ekuador
90 min.
The tale of Juan, an innocent young boy driven to delinquency by desperation and the effects on his family and the environment of his country's social, economic and moral collapse. Marked by a mixture of timidity, unrequited love, his family's impoverishment, a good friend's imprisonment, generalized repression, corruption, despair and bad advice, the youngster turns to crime for the money he needs to make the dream of his life come true: he wants to leave the country and try his luck on another continent.
John Crowley
Erresuma Batua - Irlanda
106 min.
The hapless lover and his best mate, the sex-starved singleton; the maverick detective and a ruthless petty thief; the pretty girl on the rebound with an older man; the deserted wife on the brink of breakdown; the ambitious TV producer; the robbed and abandoned fiancé and a nine-year-old tearaway all find their lives interweaving in this hilarious story of modern romance with a bitter twist.
Benoît Mariage
Frantzia
71 min.
A woman learns that she's expecting twins and can't accept the fact. Little by little she loses her grip. Her husband is totally powerless in the face of his wife's neurosis. As the last resort, they decide to undertake a pregnancy reduction, to abort one of the embryos.
Manuel Martín Cuenca
Espainia
95 min.
Pablo López is a regular guy. He's thirty-something, works in a savings bank and is sick of everything. One Monday morning, in a traffic jam right on Cibeles, he bashes into the car of Madrid's snob of snobs, causing a tremendous scandal: the snob is argumentative to say the least, insults him at length, and creates monumental problems for him with the police and insurance. Intending to have a bit of fun, Pablo decides to make life impossible for her. One day, becoming bored with the situation, Pablo runs headlong into the snob's sister, María. His life does a spectacular about-turn. Cynical, full of resentment, Pablo was convinced that his existence could never again have any kind of meaning, and, now that the light has come on before his eyes, feels that he mustn't, can't fall in love with a 15 year-old girl. But suddenly, something completely unexpected happens, changing Pablo López' life forever.
Xavier Giannoli
Frantzia
94 min.
Charlotte and Paul are twenty. They're in love. Together they discover that she is seriously ill. There's another girl, Ninon. Paul wants her, she's like an escape valve for him. Charlotte knows. The three enter a relationship of life and death.
Michaela Pavlátová
Txekiar Errepublika - Eslobakia
93 min.
Eva, a pianist, has followed her husband, Peter, a musician and composer, to a small village near the Slovak-Hungarian border. As much as Peter finds this new environment peaceful for his composing, Eva finds it difficult to expand her horizons. She feels rootless, not only because she is far from her family, but also from Prague, the city she knows so well and her friends who live there.
Hugo Rodríguez
Mexiko - Argentina - Espainia
93 min.
Lolo, a hacker with no sex appeal, spies on his charming neighbour Andrea by webcam. Two hooligans, Nene and Tomson, argue until they're blue in the face that the most probable way of getting cancer is by smoking or - as in all walks of life, according to Nene - simple bad luck. An obese Russian, Svóboda, who mistrusts even his shadow, has twenty diamonds earmarked to pay for a CD prepared by Lolo with the secret access codes of a Swiss bank. They're all after the diamonds: Svóboda, Nene and Tomson by trade, and Lolo because he plans to use his part to woo Andrea and progress from virtual love to physical contact.
Jorge Furtado
Brasil
124 min.
20-year-old André hasn't finished his studies. He works in a book and stationery store in a working-class neighbourhood of Porto Alegre, Southern Brazil. He lives with his mother, likes drawing and likes Sílvia. He desperately needs 38 reales. Sílvia is 18. She goes to night school and works during the day in a clothes shop. She lives with her father and likes reading. Sílvia has an appointment she can't miss on the summit of Mount Corcovado in Rio de Janeiro. Marinês is André's workmate. She looks great in dresses she can't afford to buy. She winds Cardoso round her little finger. The boy is in love with her and has stopped smoking because she asked him to. André needs 38 reales to buy a dress and save Sílvia's life. He invents all sorts of ways to make money and they all work. And that's when the problems start.
Gennadiy Sidorov
Errusia
100 min.
A family of refugees from Central Asia arrives to a down-and-out Russian village, with no electricity, populated only by old women and a single man with Down's syndrome. The refugees aren't welcome and the man, influenced by the old women's gossip, sets fire to the house in which they have taken shelter. The women, realizing the barbarity of the action, rush to extinguish the fire, hence the hatred gradually turns into pity, pity into understanding, and understanding into cordiality. The refugee family, for their part, do everything they can to show their willingness, the proof of which will be the construction of an electricity power station definitively uniting both communities.
Juan Madrid
Espainia
100 min.
Abdul Kader Torres, son of the former Political Social Brigade commissioner Ricardo Torres - known by those closest to him as Richi - and of the beautiful Tangiers-born Fatima, has just arrived in Madrid to take care of his father's debt recovery agency, Ejecutivas Tánger. Neither too clean nor too above-board, Abdul nevertheless accepts to take charge of the business. When it comes down to it he's a loser and there's nothing for him in his native Tangiers. He also, during the long years of his childhood, cherished an impossible dream: he's always wanted his father to love him and take him to be with him in Spain. But he's in for a shock. Madrid isn't what it seems to be. Nor is his father. Nor does the agency do what it says it does. Abdul starts to realise that his father and Ejecutivas Tánger have a dark, dirty past and present. What can he do? Report it? Just pretend?
Christian Philibert
Frantzia
88 min.
Momo, a young southern Frenchman of North African stock, is determined to redeem himself after serving for a minor offense. Hired on a trial basis in a heating installation company, he has a hard time putting up with the racism of his new employers, the Gutti Brothers. Outraged by their incompetence and their unscrupulous practices, Momo finds only one ally willing to help put them out of business: Jacques Chevalier, a lone Don Quixote and local codes officer. Comedy and rebellion, in the present day, in a village in Provence.
Pieter Kuijpers
Herbehereak
83 min.
Stan, a shy student, and Maikel, a 20-year-old petty criminal, become buddies. After a few small-scale robberies, they get involved in the organised crime scene when they accidentally shoot the victim of one of their burglaries and become contract killers. Meantime, Anna, Maikel's naive girlfriend, has moved in with him, creating a love triangle straining Maikel and Stan's friendship. As Stan tries to help Anna to escape from the increasingly vicious Maikel, he is forced by the latter to participate in one last robbery, ending in a gruesome murder. Maikel and Stan now come face to face. Stan knows that he can save Anna, but that this will kill his friendship with Maikel, a friendship which, although covered in blood, is the only true bond he has ever known.
Oliver Paulus , Stefan Hillebrand
Alemania - Suitza
78 min.
Paula Hartnagel works as a cleaning woman, leading an ordinary life. She loves life but, being a dreamer, she lives in a world of her own. When Paula believes to have found the man of her dreams in Mustafa, a Turkish security guard, her quite ordinary life suddenly starts to change. Paula mistakes politeness for love, however, and when Mustafa doesn't show up at work one day she starts to look for him, stumbling into the greatest adventure of her life. Driven by the faith in a miracle, she follows Mustafa to the large Turkish city Adana, although she has neither address nor phone number...
Amer Alwan
Frantzia - Irak
78 min.
Zaman and his wife have always lived in the Iraqi swamp region. Having met on the water, they have built their life together in their reed house. One day, Zaman learns that his wife suffers from a strange illness caused by the war. Consulting the only doctor in the region, he suggests that Zaman go to the city for the necessary medicine. Sailing on the Tigris, Zaman observes what's happening on the banks; he witnesses the ancient and modern history of the Iraqi land and its people. Resorting to all sorts of efforts and spending the little money he has, Zaman at last gets the medicine. He returns home happy and his wife is pleased to see him after so much time. But they can only exchange a very few words.
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