San Sebastian’s Basque Production Slate Mixes Global Auteurs, New Voices and Local Memory — SkimNews
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- San Sebastián's 74th edition (Sept. 18-26) features 31 titles with Basque production involvement, with 19 world premieres competing for the Irizar Basque Film Award across strands including Official Selection, New Directors, Zabaltegi-Tabakalera, Perlak, Zinemira, Made in Spain, the Velodrome and Klasikoak.
- Tsai Ming-liang brings his slow-moving Walker short series installment "Dust" to Zabaltegi-Tabakalera as a Spanish-Taiwanese collaboration produced by Homegreen Films and Vitrine Filmes, placing Lee Kang-sheng's figure against the Comb of the Wind and a Basque farmhouse.
- Nanni Moretti's "It Will Happen Tonight" arrives in Perlak from Venice as an Italian-French-Spanish production with Basque company Irusoin among its producers, starring Louis Garrel and Jasmine Trinca with a score by four-time Oscar nominee Alberto Iglesias.
- Daniel Monzón's "Pray for Us" returns to the closing years of Francoism, with Zoe Bonafonte starring opposite Manuela Calle as a 19-year-old handed over by her father to a Madrid reformatory run by nuns in 1974.
- David Pérez Sañudo's "The Harvester" stars Goya winners Patricia López Arnaiz and Antonio de la Torre in a period thriller about women found strangled outside Vitoria as the Third Carlist War winds down, pitting a victim's sister against authorities keen to suppress the scandal.
- The slate's restoration and farewell dimension includes "Bringing Shadows to Light" documenting the restoration of four 1980s Basque-language films, documentaries paying tribute to Basque rock band Gatibu and musician Fermin Muguruza, and Ana Díez's restored "Ander eta Yul" returning to the festival where it premiered in 1988.
- Koldo Almandoz's "The Last Goodbye" is an existential comedy-drama set in a funeral parlor, starring Iñigo Azpitarte and Izaro Nieto, about a man who has lost his driving license, borrowed money from a retired boxer and fallen for a trainee 25 years his junior.
Why it matters: The slate positions Basque cinema as simultaneously outward-facing and locally rooted, with Tsai Ming-liang and Nanni Moretti collaborations signaling increased appeal to major auteurs while restoration projects and Franco-era dramas anchor the industry in Basque memory. For festival programmers and regional producers, concentrating 19 world premieres into a single award category turns the Irizar Basque Film Award into the festival's clearest barometer of how a small regional industry is evolving on a global stage.
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