San Sebastian Festival’s 69th edition will recover the spirit of open air cinema with a special screening in Cristina Enea Park, sponsored by the company Amenabar, an Official Festival Collaborator. The chosen film is La Croisade / The Crusade, by Louis Garrel, who directs and stars in the tale of a mysterious project with which children all over the world plan to save the planet. The screening of this film with an environmental message will take place in one of San Sebastian’s main green lungs and will be carried out according to sustainable criteria.

This is the third feature film from the French director and actor following Les deux amis /Two Friends (2015) and L'homme fidèle / A Faithful Man (2018), for which Garrel landed San Sebastian’s Jury Prize for Best Screenplay, co-written with the deceased Jean-Claude Carrière. The screenplay of La Croisade, which had its premiere in the Special Screenings section at Cannes and is included in the Festival’s Perlak section, is also signed by both and stars the same characters as L’homme fidèle, played by Garrel himself, Laetitia Casta and Joseph Engel.

Six animated films in the Movies for Kids programme

As well as a special screening in Cristina Enea, the San Sebastian Festival will present a selection of six films for an audience of children in a section which, for the third year running, will also be sponsored by the company Amenabar. These showings for a family audience will run on the Festival weekends at the Príncipe cinemas. All of the films will be dubbed into Basque, thanks to the collaboration of Zineuskadi in the framework of the Cinema in Basque Language programme.

The section includes six animated films, four European, one Asian and a co-production between Canada and the USA: the Chinese production directed by Leon Ding, Boonie Bears: Blast into the Past / Xiong Cho Mo: Yuan Shi Shi Dai;  Kevin Johnson’s proposal Bihurri, jauretxetik kale gorrira (Trouble), about a dog who finds himself stripped of his pampered lifestyle; the German film Koko, dragoi txikia. Oihanean  (Coconut the Little Dragon: Into the Jungle / Der Kleine Drache Kokosnuss - Auf In Den Dschungel!), by Anthony Power; Dragoiaren gidaria (Dragon Rider / Drachenreiter), another German production about dragons but this time set in the Himalayas, directed by Tomer Eshed; the British movie Stardog & Turbocat, by Ben Smith, about the friendship between a dog and a cat and a space voyage; and, lastly, Elfinak (The Elfkins - Baking a Difference / Die Heinzels - Rückkehr der heinzelmännchen), about beings who live below ground and end up mixing their fates with humans, from the moviemaker Ute von Münchow-Pohl.

The San Sebastian Festival, which has been bringing films to younger audiences for three decades through its Movies for Kids section, wants to thank Amenabar for its continuing commitment to the families of Gipuzkoa and for generating new audiences. Amenabar, an Official Collaborator of the Festival since 2019, is one of Spain’s leading property developers with a background spanning almost 40 years which, as well as having its own development and construction company, also has other resource-providing endeavours (a quarry, tarmac plant, technical teams and sampler factory, among others.) Specialised in promotion and construction, with the experience of having built in excess of 25,600 homes, today the company has more than 62 developments in Spain. In addition, Amenabar has built hugely iconic buildings including the Kursaal, the Basque Culinary Center, Biodonostia Health Research Institute, Tabakalera and the San Telmo Museum, all located in San Sebastian.