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 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.

Shortly after filming with Laia Costa his Thin opera Five Little Wolves, director Alauda Ruiz de Azúa (Barakaldo, 1978) met with her producers to discuss new projects and explained that she wanted to explore the theme of religious vocation. She is not a believer, but when she was young, she met another girl who felt God's calling. "For me, having a secular upbringing, I found it fascinating and mysterious that someone could make a decision like this based on faith," she explains. The result of that interest has ended up taking shape in one of the season's films, the Catalan co-production Sundays, which arrives in theaters this Friday with the claim of the Golden Shell won at the recent San Sebastian Festival.

Triumph of Sundays at the San Sebastian Film Festival. The Golden Shell awarded to the film by the jury recognizes one of the best filmmakers of the generation of female directors that has emerged in recent years, Alauda Ruiz de Azúa (Barakaldo, 1978), who aftera beautiful debut with Five little wolves and of the acclaimed series Fly sign in Sundays her most ambitious and complex work. The film is a drama about the impact on a Basque family of their teenage daughter's decision to enter a cloistered convent after high school.

Jennifer Lawrence (Indian Hills, Kentucky, 1990) visited the San Sebastian Festival this Friday to collect the Donostia Award for her career and to present Die, my love, the Lynne Ramsay drama that the actress produces and stars in. However, after the festival's public stance in favor of the Palestinian people and the demonstration a few days ago against the genocide in Gaza, in which one of the most frequent slogans was "Boycott Israel", it was inevitable to ask Lawrence also about the company that distributes Die, my love, the Mubi platform, against which many voices in the world of cinema have been raised due to the ties of one of its investors, the Sequoia Capital fund, with an Israeli arms company.

The Spanish transition to democracy narrated as a thriller fast-paced with the epicenter in the February 23 coup. This is the feeling it conveys Anatomy of an instant, the four-part series directed by Alberto Rodríguez and produced by Movistar+ that premiered at the San Sebastián Film Festival. Inspired by the book of the same name by Javier Cercas, the series focuses on three key figures, the only members of Congress who didn't duck in Congress on February 23rd when the military started shooting: the Secretary General of the Communist Party, Santiago Carrillo (Eduard Fernández); the Prime Minister, Adolfo Suárez (Álvaro Morte); and General and Vice President Manuel Gutiérrez Mellado (Manolo Solo), to whom the first three episodes are dedicated; the fourth chronicles the trial of the military coup leaders.

Twenty-four years afterUnder construction, one of the most important and influential films of Catalan cinema of this century, José Luis Guerin (Barcelona, ​​1960) returns to film the urban and social transformations of the city where he was born and no longer lives (he moved to France last decade). He shows them in the documentary Stories from the Good Valley, which is nominated for the Golden Shell at the San Sebastian Film Festival. The filmmaker observes the Barcelona neighborhood of Vallbona, paying attention to what makes it unique: its isolation from the city (due to the highway and the C-17), the survival of an agricultural culture, and, above all, its residents, whose diversity is evident in the dozen languages speakable in the film: Arabic, Spanish, Catalan, Galician, Hindi. He films their celebrations and almost immerses himself in the Rec Comtal to show the beauty and dignity of a neighborhood and its people in his best film since, precisely, Under construction.

In the historic district of San Sebastián (Alde Zaharra or Lo Viejo, as it is known) is the restaurant La Cepa, where it is likely that the journalists accredited to the San Sebastián Festival have dined at some point because the food is good, it has a good quality/price ratio and it is not far from the Teatro Principal, where the press screenings are held. But surely more than one of you discovered this Wednesday at the screening ofA ghost in battle La Cepa is also where San Sebastián City Councillor Gregorio Ordóñez was eating when ETA shot him in the head in 1995.

In 2014, a young woman arrived at a hospital in Tucumán (a conservative province in northern Argentina) with intense abdominal pain and blood loss: she had suffered a miscarriage. Police found a fetus in one of the hospital bathrooms and, without evidence or analysis, charged her with homicide and imprisoned her. Nativity scene, which was presented this Tuesday at the San Sebastian Film Festival, recreates the struggle to free this woman, a victim of a patriarchal society and a corrupt judicial system that agreed to impose an exemplary punishment on her.

In his first film, Five little wolves, and in the series that premiered last year, Fly, Basque filmmaker Alauda Ruiz de Azúa touched on burning issues (the critical examination of motherhood, gender violence) that demonstrated her ability to engage with current societal concerns through film. But in the Catalan co-production Sundays It addresses an issue that is not part of the public debate, and in a way that moves away from the conventions of social cinema, which is often more concerned with conveying an ideological position than exploring the complexity and contradictions of reality.

The fact that actors and actresses are public figures whose joys and sorrows we know—or think we know—in detail makes it sometimes difficult to separate the role they play from their personal lives. This is true of Angelina Jolie and the film she presented this Sunday at the San Sebastián Film Festival, the drama set in the world of fashion, Couture, in which the actress plays a film director who, during the filming of a fashion film In Paris, she is diagnosed with cancer that will force her to make drastic decisions about her body and her life, as Jolie herself had to do when she underwent a double mastectomy to prevent the high probability of developing breast and ovarian cancer, a disease that already caused the death of her mother at the age of 56. Angelina Jolie is already 50, and in Couture not only showcases her great mature beauty, but it is one of her most solid roles in recent years.

If a Netflix production opened the San Sebastian Festival on Friday, this Saturday it was Movistar+ who presented the first great Spanish film in the competition, the thriller by Alberto Rodríguez The tigersFor now, the platforms are considering the cherries of audiovisual productions, which includes festivals. The tigers It is a good film, surely the most well-rounded by its director since The minimal island and, unlike this one and Model 77, has no historical or sociological ambitions and is therefore more solid in the construction of the plot and the characters. The protagonists are two submariner brothers from Huelva (Antonio de la Torre and Barbara Lennie), children and grandchildren of scuba divers, who work doing repairs or maintenance on oil platforms and ships, a kind of miners of the sea who risk their lives every day for four duros.