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.

Preceded on the calendar by two giants of the festival circuit like Toronto and Venice, the San Sebastian Film Festival must wield all possible weapons to remain relevant on the international scene. That's why, in 2017, while the major A-list festivals were considering what to do with Netflix, San Sebastian opened its doors to the platform and has ended up becoming one of its strategic allies, especially when it comes to premiering Latin American productions. This is the context that explains why a nice and fairly conventional Netflix comedy like 27 nights, directed by Uruguayan Daniel Hendler, opened the Basque festival this Friday, which had never offered such a place of honor to a film from a platform.