Eight films programmed at San Sebastian Festival’s 69th edition compete this year for the Cooperación Española Award given by the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID), an organisation dependent upon the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, European Union and Cooperation. The accolade goes every year, since 2015, to the producer of the Ibero-American film (including Spanish and Portuguese films) making the best contribution to human development, the eradication of poverty and the full exercising of human rights.
Elena González González, Head of the Department of Cultural Cooperation and Promotion at AECID; Will chair the jury alongside members Ainhoa Gainberri, technician with the International Cooperation Directorate of the Province of Gipuzkoa Department of Culture, Cooperation, Youth and Sport, and filmmaker Ione Hernández.
The Cooperación Española Award goes to an Ibero-American film screened in the Official Selection, New Directors or Horizontes Latinos. Its objective is to strengthen the commitment to work jointly with the Ibero-American audiovisual industry in order to promote new talents, stimulate the production of film projects, disseminate the values of development cooperation and boost commercialisation and internationalisation of the films.
In its seventh edition, result of the collaboration between San Sebastian Festival and AECID, the award comes with 10,000 euros.
The Cooperación Española Award will be announced on September 25 at the closing gala in the Kursaal.
|
One of the candidates, Camila saldrá esta noche / Camila Comes Out Tonight (Argentina), by Inés Barrionuevo, comes from the Official Selection, while the others come from Horizontes Latinos: El empleado y el patrón / The Employer and the Employee, by Manuel Nieto Zas (Uruguay-Argentina-Brazil-France); Amparo, by Simón Mesa Soto (Colombia-Sweden-Germany-Qatar); Aurora, by Paz Fábrega (Costa Rica-Mexico-Panama); La caja / The Box, by Lorenzo Vigas (Mexico-USA); Madalena, by Madiano Marcheti (Brazil); Noche de fuego / Prayers for the Stolen, by Tatiana Huezo (Mexico-Germany-Brazil-Qatar, and Una película de policías / A Cop Movie, by Alonso Ruizpalacios (Mexico).
OFFICIAL SELECTION |
When her grandmother falls seriously ill, Camila must move to Buenos Aires, leaving her friends and an easy-going comprehensive school for a traditional private institution. Camila’s ferocious but immature temperament will be put to the test.
HORIZONTES LATINOS |
After a long night's shift, Amparo, a single mother of two, returns home to find her children are not there. She soon finds out that her son Elías has been drafted during an army raid and will be sent to the front in a notorious war zone near the border. His fate seems sealed. With only a day left until his departure, Amparo manages to contact a man who offers to alter Elias' files and get him out. With nothing much on her side, she embarks on a race against time to free her son in a society ruled by corruption.
Surrogacy and minimalist stories combine through the life of Luisa, a young architect, sometimes dancer, sometimes teacher. What is the relationship between motherhood, roving and desire? Aurora negotiates this question mapped in the intimate archipelago shaped by the lives of engaging women, in the centre of which is Yuliana, a teenager who hides her pregnancy of several months from her mother with Luisa's complicity.
The employer is a young man who seems to have everything, except for one pressing concern: his baby’s health. The employee is looking for a job to support his newborn child and doesn’t think twice when the boss decides to hire him to work on his land. Both meet their needs by helping one another. But one day there is an accident. The unexpected occurrence will strain the ties between them, endangering the fate of the two families.
Hatzin, a young teenager from Mexico City, travels to collect his father's remains, which have been found in a mass grave amidst the huge skies and empty landscape of Northern Mexico. But a casual encounter with a man who shares a physical resemblance with his father fills him with doubts and hope about his parent's true whereabouts.
Luziane, Cristiano, and Bianca have almost nothing in common, beside the fact that they all live in the same rural city surrounded by soy fields in western Brazil. While they don't know one another, each of them is affected by Madalena's disappearance. In different parts of the town, each in their own way, they react to her absence.
In a solitary town nestled in the Mexican mountains, the girls wear boyish haircuts and have hiding places underground. Ana and her two best friends take over the houses of those who have fled and dress up as women when no one is watching. In their own impenetrable universe, magic and joy abound; meanwhile, their mothers train them to flee from those who turn them into slaves or ghosts. But one day, one of the girls doesn't make it to her hideout in time.
An experiment in documentary and narrative storytelling sheds light on one of Mexico's most controversial institutions, the police force, and the causes of the impunity that plagues the justice system.