San Sebastian Unveils 2026 New Directors Slate
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- San Sebastian Film Festival confirmed its 2026 New Directors lineup for the September 18-26 edition, drawing first and second features from 13 countries including Bulgaria, Chile, Germany, Iran, Japan, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Norway, South Korea, Spain, Taiwan, the UK, and Ukraine.
- Jaime Lorente's debut "The Bad Son" will open the sidebar, following 11-year-old Ruben who moves in with his grandmother after his father's mysterious disappearance in a rural setting where 'family wounds are passed down from one generation to another.'
- Billy Lumby's "Florid" will close the program, centering on Jamal, a young man with schizophrenia who stops his medication after growing frustrated with side effects and must confront the blurred line between reality and past family events.
- Tatjana Moutchnik's "February, Seven Days" — a Ukraine-Germany-Austria-Spain co-production — is set the day before the Ukraine war breaks out, as a man from Odesa and his son visit his brother in Germany for their mother's funeral and clashing notions of family identity surface.
- Massih Parsaei's "Lovers Sleep Alone" follows an Iranian man in Berlin whose life built around absence — from family, from Iran, from being known — is interrupted when a cousin he barely knows arrives from Tehran for a brief visit.
- Separately, San Sebastian announced additional titles including Mike Leigh's "Tender Loving Care" (arriving after TIFF) and Pablo Larraín's "My Sad Dead," a feature-length series based on four short stories by Mariana Enríquez starring Mercedes Morán and Dolores Fonzi, about a woman who can see and hear the dead.
Why it matters: Two of the sidebar's most distinctive entries — Moutchnik's 'February, Seven Days' and Parsaei's 'Lovers Sleep Alone' — engage directly with the Ukraine war and Iranian diaspora experience, signaling that the 2026 New Directors slate treats contemporary geopolitical rupture as central subject matter, not backdrop. For the 13 represented nationalities, the festival functions as a launchpad; for audiences, the lineup delivers an unusually heavy concentration of films about inherited family trauma, mental illness, and identity dislocation.
