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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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Made in Spain, a showcase of the recent Spanish cinema to which the San Sebastian Festival offers a platform for international circulation, has selected eight productions – seven feature films and the first episode in the series Escenario 0 – for its 68th edition. The selection includes titles which have participated in Spanish and international festivals, and experienced filmmakers such as Icíar Bollaín and Santiago Segura share a space with novices like Pilar Palomero and Nuria Giménez, among other names.
After several experiences in short films and having worked as a script writer in film and television, Pilar Palomero (Zaragoza, 1980) makes her feature debut with Las niñas, a generational portrait of today’s women drawn through the education they received in the Spain of the early ‘90s. The film premiered at the Generation Kplus section of the Berlin Festival and was recently presented at the Malaga Festival, where it has won two prizes: the Golden Biznaga to Best Spanish Film and the Silver Biznaga toi Best Direction of Photography for Daniela Cajías.
Precisely, the Andalusian festival was opened by La boda de Rosa (Rosa’s Wedding), in which Candela Peña plays a woman who, soon to turn 45, decides that her life needs a change. The film won the Special Jury Prize and the Silver Biznaga to the Best Supporting Actress for Nathalie Poza. This is the latest work from Icíar Bollaín (Madrid, 1967), winner of the Silver Shells for its two lead characters with Te doy mis ojos (Take My Eyes, Official Selection, 2003), and of the Jury Prize for Best Screenplay with Yuli (Official Selection, 2018). En tierra extraña (In a Foreign Land, Special Screenings, 2014) also screened at San Sebastian.
My Mexican Bretzel, the debut film by Nuria Giménez (Barcelona, 1976), received the Best Film, Best Screenplay and Best Directing awards at Gijon Festival and had its international premiere at Rotterdam Festival, where it won the Found Footage Award. The film mixes fictional and non-fictional elements on combining recreations of Vivian Barrett’s diary with images filmed by Léon Barrett from the ‘40s to the ‘60s of the 20th century.
Laura Herrero Garvin (Toledo, 1985), an experienced director of full-length and short documentaries, will participate in Made in Spain with La Mami, a work selected for the Festival’s Europe-Latin America Co-Production Forum. Her last film, shown at Barcelona’s D’A Film Festival and at Amsterdam Documentary Film Festival (IDFA), is set in a legendary Mexican cabaret where a woman lends her support to newly arriving dancers.
The actresses Irene Escolar and Bárbara Lennie are the executive producers of Escenario 0, a six-episode HBO Europe series with the collaboration of outstanding authors, directors and performers from the audiovisual and performing arts fields. The first episode, Hermanas, directed by the French playwright Pascal Rambert (Nice, 1962), author of the original play, and the Spanish filmmaker Diego Postigo (Brussels, 1974), helmer of this adaptation in which Escolar and Lennie embody two sisters with irreconcilable differences, will screen in San Sebastian.
For her part, Jaione Camborda (San Sebastian, 1983) will show her first feature film, Arima, with which she won the Best Director award in the Nuevas Olas section of Seville European Film Festival. Having directed this tale of four women and a girl whose lives are thrown into disarray with the unexpected arrival of two outsiders, the director from San Sebastian is now working on her second project, El cuerno del centeno, selected for the Ikusmira Berriak residencies programme.
Paula Cons Varela (A Coruña, 1976) premiered La isla de las mentiras / The Island of Lies at Shanghai Festival. The film evokes the true story of the sinking of the ship referred to in 1921 as the Galician Titanic. This is the first full-length feature by its director, who had previously put her name to documentaries such as La batalla desconocida (2017) and El caso Diana Quer, 500 días (2018).
Lastly, Made in Spain will include the screening of the first part of Padre no hay más que uno, the box-office hit directed by and starring Santiago Segura (Madrid, 1965), who plays a father left to care for his five children when his wife decides to go on a trip. The creator of the Torrente saga recently released in commercial cinemas the second part of this story, Padre no hay más que uno 2: La llegada de la suegra.
Arima is the story of four women and a girl whose existence is disrupted by the sudden arrival of two strangers. One of them is fleeing from the other, sneaking around town like an elusive being, a ghostly presence of uncertain existence. The other character —an injured man carrying a gun— will disrupt the women's way of life in different ways. The whole plot takes place on the fine line between reality and imagination, between dreams and nightmares, fear and desire, within a story shrouded in mystery.
An immense fall-out between two sisters. A time for reproach and love. Something for a whole life between two beings produced by the same body but profoundly different. Together. And yet, irreconcilable. A fight to the death. Head-to-head. These sisters are our sisters. They are the multitude who live inside each one of us. That multitude is called: need, truth, struggle. Hermanas is the first of the six episodes making up the TV show Escenario 0.
Rosa, about to turn 45, realizes that she has always lived for others, so she decides to press the nuclear button, shake things up, leave it all and grab hold of the reins of her life. But before all this, she wants to embark on a very special commitment: a marriage to herself. She soon discovers that her father, her siblings and her daughter have their own agenda, and that changing her life is going to be anything but easy since it is not in the family script. Marrying, even if it is with herself, will be the hardest thing she has ever done.
In the early hours of 2 January 1921, the ship Santa Isabel, on its way to Buenos Aires and with 260 people on board, sinks off the sheer, harsh coast of Sálvora island, in Galicia. With very few men on the island, three young local women, María, Josefa and Cipriana, set about rescuing 48 people, a heroic act that will cost them very dearly. After those events, an Argentine journalist, León, makes his way to Sálvora to cover the story of the shipwreck. Gradually he will discover that on said night there had been too many coincidences, even starting to suspect that they ship may have been deliberately sunk. Meanwhile, nothing will be the same. The shipwreck will shake and forever change life on the island. Inspired by true events.
Doña Olga has worked in the cabaret world for more than 45 years and now she is La Mami, in charge of the women's bathroom at the legendary Cabaret Barba Azul. Every night she takes care of the girls who work there dancing with the clients. For them, the bathroom is a bubble of confidence inside the Barba Azul. Today a new woman arrives at the bathroom, she has a sick child, she needs to work.
Celia, an 11 year-old girl, studies at a nuns school in Zaragoza and lives with her mother. Brisa, a new schoolmate recently arrived from Barcelona, pushes her towards a new stage in her life: adolescence. On this voyage, in the Spain of the Expo and the Olympics of ’92, Celia discovers that life is made up of many truths and some lies.
Intimate diary of a woman from a well-to-do background illustrated through the homespun films of her husband, a wealthy industrialist, between the ‘40s and ‘60s of last century. The film is also a classic melodrama in the style of Douglas Sirk or Todd Haynes, with highly sensitive emotions. A lightening tour of the old Europe. A romantic fantasy.
Javier is what we have dubbed as a husband-in-law. That is that without taking care of the care of the house and children at all, he knows exactly what needs to be done, and that he continuously collects a sum of sentences from the type: “It is that you do not organize” or “do not get nervous”, you already consider that overflowing woman drowns in a glass of water. Javier will have to face the reality of dealing with five children (between four and twelve years old) when his wife decides to go on a trip and leave him alone with them. The chaotic situation that takes place at home will progressively evolve ecologically to the most absolute disaster, but at the same time it will give parents and children the opportunity to meet and enjoy themselves for the first time. This experience will change their lives forever.
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