73rd San Sebastian Festival - 19/27 September 2025
73SSIFF - 19/27 September 2025
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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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Getting to Know Abel Ferrara
Films
Films
Getting to Know Abel Ferrara
Getting to Know Abel Ferrara
Abel Ferrara
USA
6 min.
Short film
Ferrara's first film, written and performed by his friend Nicodemo Oliverio, a pseudonym for Nicholas St. John. This is a kind of abstract dream, in black and white with no sound. The only copy that has been kept is on video tape.
Abel Ferrara
USA
14 min.
Short film
The story of a young working-class guy who decides to help two workmates when they decide to hold up a petrol station has a much clearer narrative structure than the previous film. Once again the only copy left is on VHS tape.
Abel Ferrara
USA
29 min.
Short film
The most ambitious of Ferrara's early shorts, it runs for thirty minutes. It first describes the sexual encounter between a painter, her girlfriend who poses as a model and a prostitute that they hire. It then focuses on a dinner organised by the painter's husband. The prostitute turns up pretending to be the model's cousin.
Abel Ferrara
USA
94 min.
An exploitation film inspired by B-movies, in which Ferrara himself plays, under the pseudonym of Jimmy Laine, a painter going through a crisis who goes mad and murders people with an electric drill. Some aspects of the story are based on the painter and musician Douglas Metro and on certain experiences that the latter and Ferrara had when they shared an apartment in lower Manhattan.
Abel Ferrara
USA
80 min.
The first unusual urban avenger in Ferrara's film career takes on the form of a dumb girl, who works at a dressmaker's, who is raped twice in the same afternoon. After killing the second rapist, she takes his gun and starts to administer her own justice. The film turns the model of rape and revenge films, a popular sub-genre at the time, on its head and aims for a distorted feminist vision.
Abel Ferrara
USA
96 min.
A violent thriller, half exploitation film and half totally standard crime movie, which was also filmed at night, it features an ex-boxer who has been traumatised by the death of an opponent in the ring, and who runs an agency with his friend that supplies girls for strip clubs. A killer who is an expert in martial arts starts to assault the girls.
Abel Ferrara
USA
96 min.
Ferrara directed the pilot for the new series produced by Michael Mann after Miami Vice. The story takes place in Chicago, in 1963, and describes the struggle against organised crime waged by the unusual lieutenant Mike Torello, a tough, sceptical, cultured policeman with a rather chaotic marital life played by the ex-policeman Dennis Farina.
Abel Ferrara
USA
98 min.
An enigmatic driver crashes into cars on the motorway and streets of the city. The brother of one of the victims decides to take action, and becomes a motorised avenger who punishes anyone who commits reckless traffic violations on the roads. Directed after he took part in Miami Vice, this is a pilot episode for a series that was never made.
Abel Ferrara
USA
90 min.
A personal reconstruction of the story of Romeo and Juliet and the youngsters in West Side Story, it replaces Montagues and Capulets and Puerto Ricans and Anglos with two youngsters, who belong to Chinese and Italian clans in New York, who try to keep their relationship out of the rivalry between their families. Ferrara considers this to be one of his favourite films.
Abel Ferrara
USA
90 min.
Adaptation of a crime novel by Elmore Leonard, one of the director's favourite writers, it tells the story of a complex thriller with personal ambitions and political intrigues that takes place half in Florida and half in Santo Domingo, with Peter Weller in the role of an ex-marine weighed down by a bloody past. Substantial cuts were made in the film by its producers.
Abel Ferrara
Italy - USA - UK
106 min.
Ferrara began to get recognition with this dry, hedonistic, violent, moral and murderous, nocturnal thriller set to the rhythms of street hip-hop. Christopher Walken, in his first film with the director, plays a gangster who gets out of jail, tries to gain control of the city, which brings him into conflict with the Italian, Asian and Colombian clans, and gives money to a hospital in the Bronx that is about to close.
Abel Ferrara
USA
96 min.
The director's most distinctively moral film: a stunning Harvey Keitel plays a tense, highly-strung, compulsive and obsessive police lieutenant who seizes the drugs from the dealers that he arrests, cavorts with prostitutes and loses huge amounts of money placing bets on sports. The case of a young nun, raped with a crucifix on the altar in a church, is to provide his personal redemption.
Abel Ferrara
USA
83 min.
The third adaptation of Jack Finney's novel about beings from another planet that land on Earth and take over people's bodies is Ferrara's most expensive film (a Hollywood product) and has a quite different setting to the previous two versions: the action takes place in an army camp. As Ferrara himself claims, this is a really disturbing story.
Abel Ferrara
USA
109 min.
An independent filmmaker (Harvey Keitel) starts to shoot a film that portrays the last night of a couple going through a crisis. The actress who stars in the film, entitled "Mother of Mirrors", is a star looking for artistic respect. The fact that this character is played by Madonna is one of the many elements that place Dangerous Game (shot as Snake Eyes) on the borderline between recreation and documentary.
Abel Ferrara
USA
79 min.
A philosophy student, played by Lili Taylor, searches through history to find the reasons why humanity has committed so much mass slaughter. When she comes out of a lecture, she is attacked by a female vampire and condemned to wander among the non-dead. A personal film about addiction shot in an extremely crude black and white, it has nothing to do with the retro-trend for vampirism.
Abel Ferrara
USA
99 min.
Standing in front of their murdered brother's coffin, the members of a mafia clan relive their past. A slightly neo-classical Ferrara, although just as efficient and skilful as ever in the composition of characters living on the edge, brought together a magnificent cast: Christopher Walken, Annabella Sciorra, Chris Penn, Benicio del Toro, Isabella Rossellini and Vincent Gallo. Last film written by Nicholas St. John.
Abel Ferrara
USA - France
98 min.
A Hollywood star loses the little control that he still has when his partner tells him she's just had an abortion. Although after a while he seems to have recovered in the arms of a reassuring young woman played by Claudia Schiffer, something in his conscience is still not quite right. A trip from New York to Miami fuelled by drugs, madness and the dark labyrinths of memory.
Abel Ferrara, Bob Balaban, Patricia Benoit, Julie Dash, Jonathan Demme, Ted Demme, Alison Maclean, Craig McKay, Lucas Platt, Seth Zvi Rosenfeld
USA
80 min.
A TV film produced by Jonathan Demme for HBO, that tells ten stories set on the New York subway. Ferrara directed the ninth, Love on the A Train, which focuses on the atypical relationship between a man and a woman who just look at each other and hardly even brush against each other in the same carriage for nine months. Jonathan Demme, his late nephew Ted Demme and Bob Balaban are some of the other directors.
Abel Ferrara
USA
93 min.
The world of mega-corporations, genetic engineering, information trafficking and industrial espionage are given the Ferrara touch, based on a story by William Gibson. Christopher Walken and Willem Dafoe, who co-produced the film, have to win the trust of a Japanese engineer with a prostitute played by Asia Argento as an accomplice. Half way between cyberpunk and film noir.
Abel Ferrara
USA - France
85 min.
The film is set in Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's New York, in the city of zero tolerance, and makes use of the outline of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol to describe the everyday activities of a couple of Latino drug dealers. The husband is kidnapped by a black policeman, who is just as interested in the ransom money as in making moral judgements on the couple's way of life.
Abel Ferrara
France - Italy
86 min.
After finishing shooting a film about Jesus Christ, the actress who plays Mary Magdalene (Juliette Binoche) decides to go to Jerusalem to clear up the doubts that the character has aroused in her. One year later, in New York, a journalist presents a television series on the historical figure of Jesus. In his latest film, Ferrara, influenced by the Gnostic gospels, faces up to the problems of religion.
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