Keys to This Year’s San Sebastian’s Festival

variety.com:

John Hopewell Chief International Correspondent Spain’s 71st San Sebastian Film Festival is tracking to welcome an even larger industry presence than 2022, currently up 10% in attendance on 2022’s already bullish figures, its status as the biggest movie event in the Spanish-speaking world remaining undiminished.

Here are 10 key takes on potential highlights and trends which look likely to shape this year’s edition, running Sept. 22-30: New Talent Boasting a prestigious New Directors’ section as its biggest sidebar and an Ikusmira Berriak development lab for emerging cineasts, San Sebastian has always been strong on new talent.

In 2023, however, it is even stronger still. 10 of its 16 main competition entries are first (three) or second features (seven). “Having so many new directors is part coincidence,” says San Sebastian director José Luis Rebordinos.

But the presence of so many emerging directors may reflect new industry dynamics and recent years of fuller employment. “My impression is that some young directors now move fast, make shorts and co-write screenplays before making first features and this experience means these films are more rounded and mature,” he adds, citing competition contender Isabella Eklöf, who co-wrote Ali Abbasi’s Oscar-nominated “Border.” Women Make Their Mark Seven of the first or second-time fiction feature directors in San Sebastian competition this year are women, and more than half of their films strongly women-centric, whether capturing the memories of a Black women in rural Mississippi (Raven Jackson’s “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt,”) toxic masculinity in the Outback (Kitty Green’s “Royal Hotel”) or women’s reproductive rights in past rural Galicia (Jaione Camborda’s “The Rye Horn”)..