María Alché and Benjamín Naishtat, Robin Campillo, Joachim Lafosse, Noah Pritzker, Cristi Puiu and Martín Rejtman will be presenting their latest films in the Official Selection of the 71st San Sebastián Festival, which will be held from the 22nd and the 30th of September. Raven Jackson will also be competing with her first film, which in its project stage took part in the Ikusmira Berriak residency programme.

María Alché (Buenos Aires, Argentina.1983) and Benjamín Naishtat (Buenos Aires, Argentina. 1986) jointly direct Puan, in which Marcelo Subiotto and Leonardo Sbaraglia play two professors at odds over a university chair. Alché won the Horizontes Award with her first feature film, Familia sumergida / A Family Submerged (2018), and this year she is also an Ikusmira Berriak programme resident. For his part, Naishtat won the Silver Shell for best director with Rojo (2018), which also won the awards for best actor and best photography, and before this he took part in the Horizontes Latinos section (Historia del miedo / History of Fear, 2014). Puan was selected in Proyecta 2021 and with the films they have made separately Alché and Naishtat have visited other festivals such as the ones in Berlin and Locarno.

The French filmmaker Robin Campillo (Mohammédia, Morocco, 1962) will be competing at San Sebastián for the first time with the film L'île rouge / Red Island, which deals with the French colonisation of Madagascar. His fourth film as a director comes after winning the Grand Prix of the Jury at Cannes with 120 battements par minute (120 BPM) / 120 Beats Per Minute (Perlak, 2017). In 2009 his debut as a director, Les Revenants / They came back (2004), was included in the Backwash: The Cutting Edge of French Cinema retrospective, and in 2012 he took part in the Official Selection as the co-scriptwriter of Foxfire, by Laurent Cantet.

Raven Jackson (Tennessee, USA. 1990) will be competing at San Sebastián with her debut film, but she has a close relationship with the Festival. On the one hand, she took part in the Nest section, the international competition for short films by film students, with Nettles (2018) and, on the other, in the Ikusmira Berriak programme she developed the film that she is presenting at the 71st Festival, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, a lyrical exploration of the life of a woman in Mississippi that was screened this year in the U.S. Dramatic Competition at Sundance.

Joachim Lafosse (Uccle, Belgium. 1975) will be back at the official competition with his tenth full-length film Un silence / A Silence, a drama starring Emmanuelle Devos and Daniel Auteuil. In 2015 he won the Silver Shell for Best Director for Les chevaliers blancs / The White Knights, and two of his films have been screened in the Perlak section: L'économie du couple / After Love (2016) and Les intranquilles / The Restless (2021).

After his debut with the film Quitters (2015), Noah Pritzker (San Francisco, USA. 1986) will be visiting San Sebastián for the first time to present his second feature film, Ex-Husbands, which portrays the sentimental ups and downs of several men in the same family. Griffin Dunne, James Norton, Miles Heizer, Rosanna Arquette and Eisa Davis form part of the cast of the film.

The films by Cristi Puiu (Bucharest, Romania. 1967) have been screened at the Cannes and Karlovy Vary festivals, and The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, (2005), which in 2014 was included in the Eastern Promises. Portrait of Eastern Europe in 50 films retrospective, is considered to be a key film in the new wave of Rumanian cinema. In 2016 he took part in the Perlak section with Sieranevada, and this year he will be in the official competition with MMXX, that captures the wanderings of a bunch of errant souls stuck at the crossroads of history.

Martín Rejtman (Buenos Aires, Argentina. 1961) will take part in the Official Selection for the first time with La práctica / The Practice, a comedy starring actor Esteban Bigliardi as a yoga teacher in a marital crisis. Several of his previous films have been shown in San Sebastian: Silvia Prieto (1999) was in the Made in Spanish section, Los guantes mágicos  / The Magic Gloves (2004) and Dos disparos / Two Shots Fired (2014) in Horizontes Latinos, and the short film Shakti (2019) in Zabaltegi-Tabakalera, the year Rejtman chaired the Nest jury. Finally, in 2020 his project El repartidor está en camino / Riders won the Eurimages Development Co-production Award at the Europe-Latin America Co-production Forum.

Films