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The 2025 San Sebastián Film Festival
Sundays (Photo: David Harranz) The 73rd San Sebastian International Film Festival marked the penultimate edition for its director José Luis Rebordinos, who has grown and expanded the event on Spain’s northern Basque coastline over his 15 years at the helm. One noticeable element of his programming down the years has been its satisfying cohesion, with themes frequently running across the festival’s different strands so that discussion of ideas is able to break out beyond a single movie into wider debate. Perhaps, as he begins to contemplate passing the baton onwards, it should come as little surprise then, that one of this year’s key subjects was intergenerational communication, or the lack of it, especially within families.
It lies at the heart of Golden Shell winner Sundays, written and directed by Basque filmmaker Alauda Ruiz de Azúa, which also won the FIPRESCI critics award and Irizar Basque Film gong. Her nuanced drama, which has welcome touches of humor and some glorious choral singing, revolves around a finely tuned and moving central performance from Blanca Soroa as Ainara, an angelic-faced 17-year-old, whose announcement that she is considering becoming a cloistered nun sends shockwaves through her family. Ruiz de Azúa maintains ambiguity surrounding the degree to which this is a true calling or driven by the fact Ainara’s mother has died and her relationship with her father Iñaki (Miguel Garcés) is buttoned up tight. The filmmaker is also interested in the wider family dynamic, as issues around a loan from Ainara’s paternal grandmother (Mabel Rivera) to Iñaki cause friction with the youngster’s aunt Maite (Patricia López Arnaiz, in another knock-out performance after last year’s Glimmers), who believes her niece has fallen in thrall to the nuns and needs to live more before any decision is taken. more
The enigmatic drivers of Ainara’s choice are added to by Ruiz de Azúa’s careful crafting of an inscrutable mother superior (Nagore Aranburu), whose calm response to the teenager’s inquiry is the polar opposite to the fiery Maite. “I have faith in the spectator. I wanted to generate a space for debate, not a fight,” the director said earlier in the week, which is a succinct way of putting it, although the enduring ambiguity may be a bit too “drifting” for some audiences as they try to decide where to put their faith.
If Sundays sees adults trying to second guess a teenager, the reverse is true for Screenplay and Directing Silver Shell winner Six Days In Spring. Belgian filmmaker Joachim Lafosse – co-writing with Chloé Duponchelle and Paul Ismaël – takes a grown-up approach to issues surrounding divorce and class difference in his latest drama. Single mother Sana (Eye Haïdara, who could easily have taken home an acting prize) secretly takes her twin sons (Leonis Pinero Müller and Teodor Pinero Müller) and new, much younger boyfriend Jules (Jules Waring) to the posh holiday home belonging to her estranged husband’s parents. Lafosse captures the ebb and flow of the mood, not just surrounding tensions of whether they will be caught “trespassing” but as the children suddenly realise the geography of their family has shifted and that things they once thought permanent have vanished overnight. There’s a humanistic warmth to Lafosse’s approach to the subject that is in marked contrast to his previous hard-edged historic abuse drama A Silence. Lafosse, who drew on an incident from his own childhood for his latest, told me earlier this week, “I can’t be tragic any longer.”
Adult children trying to relitigate incidents from their childhood was also a theme in multiple movies this year. It’s present in Joachim Trier’s intellectually rigorous and moving Cannes Grand Prix winner Sentimental Value, which screened in San Sebastian’s festival favorites Pearls section, as two sisters (Renate Reinsve and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) grapple with their tricky relationship with their filmmaker father (Stellan Skarsgård). Also in Pearls was Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grazia, which also explores ideas of devotion to duty that apply both to a president (Toni Servillo) nearing the end of his term in office and the adult daughter (Anna Ferzetti), who subjugates her own desires in order to look after him.
Meanwhile, in the main competition, issues of past trauma and reconciliation were approached from a largely emotional angle in Maspalomas, the latest collaboration from Basque festival favourites Aitor Arregi and Jose Mari Goenaga (Flowers, The Endless Trench). It focuses on Vicente (José Ramón Soroiz), an ageing and openly gay man, who finds himself retreating back into the closet after a stroke takes him back to a care home in San Sebastian from the Canary island resort of the film’s title, where he has been living for two decades.
A delicately worked character study, which saw Basque-born Soroiz share the Silver Shell acting accolade ex aequo in San Sebastian with Zhao Xiaohong (Her Heart Beats In Its Cage), Maspalomas makes space to consider that though Vicente’s choices may have been right for him, they have had a lasting impact on his relationship with his now adult daughter (Nagore Aranburu). Forthright in its depiction of gay hook-ups but open-hearted in its approach to all its characters – even Vicente’s hyper-macho and, apparently, prejudiced roommate Ramon (Zorion Eguileor in an impressive supporting turn) – the film also addresses the impact Covid had on many care homes within Spain and beyond.
Communication between the generations crosses the language barrier and finds itself being expressed in unexpected ways via technology in Olmo Omerzu’s Ungrateful Beings. When English-speaking dad David (Irish star Barry Ward, Jimmy’s Hall, That They May Face The Rising Sun) takes his teenage daughter Klara (Dexter Franc) and her younger brother Theo (Antonin Chmela) on holiday, it’s Klara’s eating disorder and ongoing refusal to eat that is his focus. A summer fling with local hottie Denis (Timon Šturbej) has an unexpectedly positive impact on Klara until unforeseen circumstances see the family head home to the Czech Republic early and David and his estranged wife (Barbora Bobulova) trying to lift their daughter out of a tailspin.
Omerzu, who has tackled teenage themes before in A Family Film and Winter Flies, is adept at subverting expectations and does so again here as he shows a family struggling to communicate no matter what language they speak. Ironically, text messages may hold the key to Klara’s mental health, even if it means her father has to adopt a language way outside of his comfort zone. Beyond tackling complex themes, Omerzu has a keen eye for humour and a sharp ear for the unforgiving way that siblings often communicate with one another, such as when Theo tells Klara: “Why don’t you just die and leave me alone!”
Adult and child relationships are also a keystone of the New Directors winner Weightless, although this time it’s outside of the family. Danish director Emilie Thalund’s debut feature, scripted by Marianne Lentz, immerses us in a summer camp stay taken by teenager Lea (Marie Helweg Augustsen, who like Saora in Sundays announces herself as a talent to watch). She is on the trip in a bid to shed some pounds and rooming with the much slimmer Sasha (Ella Paaske), viewing her new rebellious friend as a role model of sorts, even though she feels uncomfortable when they hang out with a group of local boys.
But when Lea takes a shine to one of the camp’s instructors Rune (Joachim Fjelstrup), Lentz shows it may not just be her who doesn’t see the risks. Thalund’s direction keeps us in Lea’s headspace, exploring the psychological impact that happens when what she imagines crashes up against reality and using details, like the plaster Rune puts on her knee, to remind us that whatever her desires, she is still a child. One of the lovely elements in the film’s periphery is the economical way it shows how close Lea’s relationship with her own mother is at the start of the film.
In addition to directors, there are always a handful of stars who take their place on the red carpet, with Couture’s Angelina Jolie dropping in to show support for director Alice Winocour and Colin Farrell in town with Edward Berger’s good-looking but dramatically thin Ballad Of A Small Player. Rebondinos has also looked towards the next generation with one of his Donostia Awards – a lifetime achievement gong that has traditionally been given several decades into careers, with past recipients including the likes of Judi Dench, Juliette Binoche and Cate Blanchett. This year, Jennifer Lawrence, at 35, became its youngest recipient. The choice seems designed to remind younger audiences that the stars they are familiar with have just as much of a place at the festival as those who older generations have watched down the years. It certainly seems to be paying off with 32,425 tickets for screenings across the first three days of the festival selling on the first day of public sales, up 3% on last year.
Lawrence doubtless has a lot of life left in her career yet and it’s enjoyable to note that so does the red carpet that she walked down. Now the festival has wrapped the carpet is going to be taken up and transformed into more than a thousand bags for donation to the Gipuzkoa Food Bank, generating 300 hours of “socially responsible, inclusive work” along the way. Other festivals should take note.
