New films from directors Mike Leigh, François Ozon, Edward Berger, Joshua Oppenheimer, and Costa-Gavras will vie for the Golden Shell at this year’s San Sebastian Film Festival. Organizers on Tuesday announced the competition line-up for the 72nd edition of San Sebastian, which runs from September 20-28.
Highlights include Leigh’s hotly-anticipated new film Hard Truths, which will see the iconoclastic British director reunite with his Secrets & Lies star Marianne Jean-Baptiste; and Conclave, Berger’s follow-up to his multiple-Oscar winner All Quiet on the Western Front. The Vatican thriller stars Ralph Fiennes as a cardinal tasked with supervising a conclave following the sudden death of the Pope to choose a successor.
Veteran political filmmaker Costa-Gavras (Missing, Z) returns to San Sebastian with Last Breath, a drama about a palliative care doctor. Ozon will make his sixth appearance in the festival’s official selection with When Fall Is Coming, a French drama starring Hélène Vincent, Josiane Balasko, Ludivine Sagnier and Pierre Lottin. Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa comes to the Catalan festival with Serpent’s Path, a French-language adaptation of his own 1998 movie about a man hell-bent on revenge for his daughter’s brutal murder. Ko Shibasaki, Damien Bonnard and Mathieu Amalric star.
Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker Maite Alberdi (The Mole Agent, The Eternal Memory) will bring her narrative debut, El lugar de la otra, an adaptation of Alia Trabucco Zerán’s 2019 essay Las Homicidas about the true story of the writer María Carolina Geel, who shot her lover dead in 1955. Joshua Oppenheimer, the two-time Oscar-nominated documentarian of The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, will also premiere his narrative debut in San Sebastian. The End, starring Tilda Swinton, George MacKay, Moses Ingram, and Michael Shannon is a Golden Age musical about one of the last families on earth.
Gia Coppola, whose last two features, Palo Alto (2013) and Mainstream (2020) screened in Venice, will bring The Last Showgirl to San Sebastian. Pamela Anderson, Jamie Lee Curtis and Dave Bautista star in the drama about seasoned showgirl who must plan for her future when her show closes after a 30-year run.
Argentine director Diego Lerman returns to the competition for the third time with El hombre que amaba los platos voladores, a film about a famous TV recording of a supposed alien presence. Lerman’s The Substitute won the Silver Shell in San Sebastian in 2022 and the best screenplay jury prize for A Sort of Family in 2017.
The festival continues its tradition of showcasing emerging talent, with acclaimed shorts director Laura Carreira, bringing her debut feature, On Falling, a portrayal of the precarious life of a Portuguese warehouse worker in Scotland, to San Sebastian competition. The line-up also includes Bound in Heaven, the feature debut of Xin Huo, the screenwriter on Kung Fu Hustle (2004), and The Monkey King (2014). The Chinese director tells the tale of a terminally ill man and a young girl trapped by violence as they set out on a race against the clock through different cities.
Audrey Diwan’s Emmanuelle, an adaptation of Emmanuelle Arsan’s 1967 erotic novel starring Noémie Merlant and Naomi Watts, will open the 72nd San Sebastian Festival on September 20.