The XVIII edition of Nest Film Students, the international film students meeting to take place in the framework of the San Sebastian Festival’s 67th edition, has selected fourteen short films from among the 373 submitted by 186 schools in 46 countries. The chosen projects come from Argentina, Belgium, Chile, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Portugal, Russia and the UK. The figures mean that, in a year, the number of participating schools has risen by 34% and the number of short films submitted by 22%.

Organised by the San Sebastian Festival and Tabakalera International Centre for Contemporary Culture, the meeting has the objective of drawing attention to the work of students from film schools all over the world. For five days, from Monday 23 to Friday 27 September, the young people will show their short films and attend masterclasses given by important film industry figures presenting their films in San Sebastian. Last year, filmmakers Alexander Payne, Peter Strickland, Jaime Rosales, Albertina Carri and Virgil Vernier shared their knowledge with the apprentices. The audience, students and professionals watch and talk about the selected short films in the Tabakalera cinema.

Once again, the short films in the Festival’s youngest section deal with the contemporary concerns of filmmakers all over the world, looking at tales of identity, love, work, future, desire, violence and existential doubts. But if we were to highlight any single trend running through many of the works in this edition of Nest we could sum it up in a single word: family. Its presence, its absence, the new models of coexistence, the future of this kind of relationships and the intimacy of those links, provide the backbone of these works: from the everyday life of a single mother to the emotional tension between two Russian siblings on a day of mourning; from the portrayal in 16mm of a Japanese grandmother to the political and vital memory of family archives; from the loneliness of numerous people as they search for their place in the world to the emotion of the moment in which a person discovers, as only a fire can make us realise, that they’re about to become an adult.

For the first time, this year’s edition sees the selection of a film submitted by the Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola (EQZE), an institution backed by the Festival, Tabakalera and the Filmoteca Vasca. The work in question is La enorme presencia de los muertos, a short film by José María Avilés (Cuenca, Ecuador, 1988), who is currently furthering his film studies with a post-graduate course in Creation at the school in San Sebastian.

This year, the Argentine director Martín Rejtman will chair a specific jury made up of students from the participating schools. Together they will decide the winner of the Nest Film Students Best Short Film Award, sponsored by Orona Fundazioa. This award, which will go to the director of the chosen project, now has double the prize money and will come this year with 10,000 euros. Rejtman (Buenos Aires, 1961) is the author of titles such as Silvia Prieto (1999), screened in Made in Spanish, and Los guantes mágicos (The Magic Gloves, 2003), winner of the FIPRESCI Prize for best Argentine film and participant in Horizontes Latinos, the section in which he also presented Dos disparos (Two Shots Fired, 2014) after having competed in Locarno. His latest work to date, Shakti (2019), was a competitor at Berlin Festival’s Official Section of short films and this year it will be shown in Zabaltegi-Tabakalera. The director will return to Tabakalera following the retrospective dedicated to him on its cinema screen and having given a film workshop at the centre in 2016.

Conceived as one of the Festival’s most important sections within its strategy to foster new talents, Nest Film Students has started to produce its first fruit. In this edition, the filmmaker Oren Gerner (Petah-Tikva, Israel, 1984) will present in New Directors his first feature film, Africa, only five years after winning the Nest Film Students Award with Greenland, his graduation short. The section is organised by the San Sebastian Festival and Tabakalera, and is part of the legacy of San Sebastian, European Capital of Culture 2016.