Two scout leaders, ten scout children, a mountain refuge isolated by a snowstorm, and an unexpected apparition. These are the elements with which directors Paula Serra (Palamós, 1998) and Clàudia Serra (Barcelona, 1998) build the thriller horror film 11, a story about childhood and evil that thematically coincides with the leitmotif of this edition of the Sitges Festival, where this opera prima, darker than it seems, is also the only production in its original Catalan version in the competition.

Saturday evening, just before Peter Jackson (Pukerua Bay, New Zealand, 1961) received the Grand Honorary Award at the Sitges Festival, the usual montage of scenes from the honoree's filmography was screened which, in this case, culminated in the iconic image of King Kong walking towards the town of Sitges that is never missing from any festival session. “For me this is truly incredible –said an emotional Jackson–, because two important things coincide: that the King Kong from 1933 is my favorite movie of all time and that Sitges is my favorite festival in the world”.

There are Hollywood couples who try not to mix love and work to protect their relationship, but that is not the case for Kevin Bacon (Philadelphia, 1958) and Kyra Sedgwick (New York, 1965), married since 1988: they have shared the screen on numerous occasions and have even directed one another in films and series. In Family movie, which was presented this Saturday at Sitges, the actor from Mystic river and the actress from The closer go further and make cinema a family affair: the film is directed by Bacon, produced by Sedgwick, and stars both of them and their children, Sosie and Travis. Of course, they filmed it at the family home.

Recovered from the open-heart surgery that saved his life, Nicolas Winding Refn (Copenhagen, 1970) maintains his characteristic ironic smile, but his discourse is more direct and urgent. The director has traveled to the Sitges Festival to present Su propio infierno, which arrives in theaters on Friday. It is his most stylized and radical film, a symphonic horror tale that delves, led by Sophie Thatcher and Charles Melton, into an urban neon-pink dystopia where a killer murders with impunity and a soldier searches for his missing daughter. A fascinating work from a prodigal son of Sitges who, inevitably, has eclipsed the festival's official opening film, Found alive, by Carlota Pereda.

When Diego Luna (Toluca de Lerdo, Mexico, 1979) was just two years old, his mother, the artist and set designer Fiona Alexander, died in a car accident. Upon reading Brenda Navarro's novel Ceniza en la boca (Sexto Piso, 2022), the actor and director recognized the echo of his own experience in a character as different from him as Lucila, the Mexican teenager who migrates with her younger brother to Spain –first to Madrid, then to Barcelona– to reunite with the mother who abandoned them eight years earlier. But above all, he was fascinated by the clash of perspectives: “The daughter sees her mother's departure as an act of abandonment, but the mother feels she is making a great sacrifice for her children. As a father, I cannot stop thinking about how painful it must be to live away from one's children and start from scratch in another place. But I am also a son, and the absence of the maternal figure is a subject that has occupied my thoughts every day of my life”.

The Hollywood of the golden age has lost one of its last icons. Eva Marie Saint, who died at her home in Los Angeles at 97 years old from natural causes, was an actress of dramatic prominence and defiant beauty who worked with all the great names of her era: Marlon Brando, Alfred Hitchcock, Paul Newman, Elia Kazan, Cary Grant, Elizabeth Taylor, Gregory Peck... A career that spans seven decades of film history but which shone especially in the 50s, when she debuted with On the Waterfront, a masterful face-to-face with Brando that earned her the Oscar, and also when in 1959 she starred with Cary Grant in Hitchcock's classic North by Northwest.

It was the only possible Golden Shell. Tender loving care, which will surely be the last work of the British filmmaker Mike Leigh, has won the award for best film at the San Sebastian Festival. It is a recognition that should not be interpreted only as a tribute to a great director in his farewell to cinema due to health problems –he suffers from myositis, which weakens the musculature and hinders movement– that have prevented him from collecting the award in person. On the contrary, this minimalist film about two social workers and the parents of one of them is extraordinary and deeply humanistic, one of the best works by an author who is a champion of cinematic realism and who, for more than five decades, has dedicated himself to portraying life in all its painful complexity and beauty.

According to a 2024 study by the Ministry of Equality, at least 114,576 women engage in prostitution in Spain, a third of whom are in Catalonia, which would be the region with the most prostitutes in Europe. At the San Sebastian Festival, the official section presented this Friday El castillo, a Movistar+ series that seeks to explain the reality of prostitution based on the boom that occurred at the end of the last century with human trafficking for sexual exploitation when, coinciding with economic growth and increased immigration, Spanish pimps went from exploiting two or three women to the massive and wild importation of immigrants from poorer countries and controlling them through a debt that was increasing in a perverse way.

Five years after receiving the Donostia Award, Marion Cotillard has returned to the San Sebastian Festival, but this time to compete for the Golden Shell with the family thriller crossed by politics 7h40 ce matin-là. In the film, she plays a former leftist revolutionary who, after 15 years in prison, reunites with the son she abandoned for armed struggle, who is now an adult working as a mechanic in a garage. Like in the thriller about cults Karma, which she presented at the last Cannes Festival, Cotillard moves away from her glamorous image as an official Chanel ambassador. Here she is a tough and opaque woman, who seeks a job as a waitress in a provincial town to be close to her son and watch him; sometimes she talks to him, but without ever revealing her identity, like a silent spy with a secret agenda.

Brad Pitt, the big star of this edition of the San Sebastian Festival, arrived in the city on Sunday, signed autographs for twenty minutes at the doors of the Hotel María Cristina and has spent three days on vacation before attending to the promotional commitments that brought him to the Basque event, where he was already present in 2009 to present Inglourious Basterds. As he did then, the actor took the opportunity to visit the Chillida Leku museum and the Comb of the Wind, this time in the company of his current partner, Inés de Ramón.

What an exciting and deeply humanistic film has been released the British Mike Leigh to the official competition of the San Sebastian Festival. Tender loving care is one of the best works by the director of Secrets and lies (1996), a portrait of two women and the parents of one of them whom Leigh shows in all their imperfect beauty, without condescension or idealizations. In previous films such as Naked (1993)and Hard truths (2024) this has resulted in rawness and harshness, but in this case, tenderness dominates. Like another of the great titles of this season, Suddenly(Suddenly, in the original French), by Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Tender loving care is above all a film about the importance of taking care of each other, but also about the limits of this love.

A few days before its theatrical release The Black Ball, the troupe of the Javis has revolutionized the San Sebastián Festival, where the film was screened for the first time in the country on the same day it won the audience award at the Toronto Festival, a new boost in its race towards the Oscars. In the film, Penélope Cruz (Alcobendas, 1974) plays a small but essential role, a kind of cabaret singer who serves as inspiration for the gay soldier from the Francoist side played by Guitarricadelafuente.

Cinema begins to sink its fangs into the fascinating universe of gothic horror of Mariana Enríquez, who is the great current reference of Latin American fantastic literature, with an extraordinary universe of gothic horror deeply rooted in the Argentine reality that has not gone unnoticed by cinema. While the adaptation that the Barcelona-born Marçal Forés is preparing of the short story was being finalized Where are you, my heart?, last year it premiered at the Sitges Festival the remarkable La virgen de la tosquera, which started from two of the author's short stories, and this Sunday it has arrived at the San Sebastian Festival My sad dead, in which the Chilean Pablo Larraín adapts four of Enríquez's short stories: A sunny place for shady people, My sad dead, When we spoke to the dead and Julie.

This year, the San Sebastian Festival has rushed to present its Donostia awards. While Werner Herzog received his during Friday's opening, this Saturday was the tribute to Naomi Watts (Shoreham, United Kingdom, 1968), an actress of proven talent and a hard worker by nature whom David Lynch discovered in 2001 in Mulholland Drive. A double and fascinating character, that of that endless masterpiece, which she still remembers with pride and gratitude: “I had been looking for a role like that for a good ten years. Before, I experienced a lot of rejection, many ‘you’re not enough...’ or ‘you’re too...’, to the point that I would go to auditions with a very negative energy. But David Lynch saw something in me and gave me the role of my life. Many people don't get to play two such different characters over the course of their career, and I was able to do them in the same film. I owe an eternal debt to David Lynch”.

With an early morning rain that has cooled the day, the San Sebastian Festival has kicked off this Friday, which in its first day features as a protagonist one of the own names of this edition: the German filmmaker Werner Herzog, who comes to the festival to present his new film, the eccentric and fun Family Romance, LLC, but also to receive the first Donostia Award of this edition –the second will be for Naomi Watts–. A more than fair recognition in the formidable trajectory of a giant of European cinema. For the director of Fitzcarraldo, however, winning awards does not make him look back. “I am not interested; there is still work to be done –he asserts–. I am focused on the present. In fact, I have almost finished my next film; I only have three days left. And I am working on two books. But I am not a workaholic. My working days are short, and so are the shooting ones: we usually finish at 3:30 PM or 4:00 PM”.

When he was invited to create a mural at the Joan Miró Foundation in 2010, the American illustrator Brian Rea was working full-time as an art director for the opinion section of the New York Times, a stressful job that caused him a lot of anxiety. A compulsive list-maker, Rea had started writing down in his diary all the things that caused him stress with the goal of reducing his anxiety. The list grew and grew until Rea had the idea of turning it into one of the murals to paint at the Joan Miró Foundation, the piece Fears. “It was a wall of words, and I remember how the public looked at it and how they reacted,” explains Rea. “People crying, people laughing, people pointing at parts of it. As an illustrator, you don't have much contact with your audience. Yes, someone would tell me once in a while that they liked a drawing of mine, and that was it. So seeing people's reactions in real time was very important to me. But, at the end of the day, it was a text-based work, and I decided to work on achieving that level of emotional resonance in my visual works.”

When José Luis Rebordinos (Errenteria, 1961) began directing the San Sebastian Film Festival in 2010, the event had a budget of 6.5 million, which this year has reached 11 million. The festival, which kicks off a new edition this Friday with stars like Brad Pitt, Naomi Watts, and Marion Cotillard, has expanded and consolidated its central position in the Spanish film ecosystem during Rebordinos' tenure, who this year will put an end to his time as director.

Rosalía adds seven nominations for the next edition of the Latin Grammys. The singer is nominated in the top category of Album of the Year for her latest record, Lux, which is also nominated for Best Alternative Music Album, and the single La perla gathers three more nominations for Record of the Year, Song of the Year and Best Pop Song. Additionally, Rosalía is nominated in the category of Best Portuguese Language Song for Memória and in the Best Music Video category for Sauvignon Blanc.

While preparing Sense sostre, the film with which he would debut in 2019 as a director, Pep Garrido (Barcelona, 1979) became the father of a girl, Tanit, and a friend gave him the book Tanit, by Núria Albó, which in 1984 won the first edition of the El Vaixell de Vapor Prize for children's literature. For Garrido, it was an exciting discovery: "It is not like children's books today; both the story and the characters are brutal." At just over 100 pages, Tanit revolves around the unexpected friendship between a determined girl and a mysterious old woman who lives in the forest, Perona. "It touched on many themes from Sense sostre, but it was its luminous reverse, and I really wanted to make a film that my children could watch," says Garrido.

Manel Dueso, actor, director, playwright, and poet with an extensive and prestigious theatrical curriculum, has died this Tuesday at the age of 73 as a result of cancer. He performed and directed more than a hundred plays by authors such as Shakespeare, Chekhov –his great predilection–, Molière, and Beckett, among many others, and wrote more than twenty plays, a production that validates him as a first-rate stage animal. As an actor, he was a well-known face thanks to such popular series as La Riera, Nit i dia, Cuéntame, Isabel, El cor de la ciutat, Secrets de família and Laberint d'ombres, and in cinema he worked under the direction of directors such as Jaume Balagueró (Mientras duermes) and Manuel Huerga (Salvador).