01/09/2025 - The latest films by Edward Berger, Claire Denis, Joachim Lafosse, Kasia Adamik and Daniel Hendler, as well as Juliette Binoche’s directorial debut, round off the festival's programme

UPDATE (1 September 2025): The festival has announced the opening film, 27 Nights by Uruguayan actor-director Daniel Hendler, in which Marilú Marini plays an 80-year-old millionaire forced into a psychiatric clinic by her daughters, which will play in competition; and the closing film Winter of the Crow, directed by Poland's Kasia Adamik and based on a short story by Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk, in which Lesley Manville is a British professor who arrives in Poland to give a lecture in December 1981, just as martial law is coming into force, which will play out of competition.

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The San Sebastián International Film Festival has announced the new features which will be duking it out for the Golden Shell at the upcoming edition (19-27 September). They thus join the previously announced names (see the news), as listed below this article.

After locking horns for the Golden Shell last year with Conclave [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Red Carpet @ European Film …
film profile], which ended up winning the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, and previously picking up the same statuette for All Quiet on the Western Front [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Edward Berger
film profile], but this time the one for Best International Feature Film, Germany’s Edward Berger returns to the San Sebastián competition with Ballad of a Small Player, starring Colin Farrell as a gambler in Macao whose past begins to catch with him.

French filmmaker Claire Denis (Grand Jury Prize at Cannes for Stars at Noon [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] and Silver Bear for Best Director at the Berlinale for Both Sides of the Blade [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile]), who took home the FIPRESCI Award from San Sebastián with High Life [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Claire Denis
film profile] in 2018, will be competing at the Basque gathering for the second time with The Fence, an adaptation of Bernard-Marie Koltès’ work Black Battles with Dogs. Her new feature is set in the living quarters of a construction site in West Africa, and stars Isaach de Bankolé, Matt Dillon, Mia McKenna-Bruce and Tom Blyth.

Six Days in Spring is the title of the new feature by Joachim Lafosse, in which Eye Haïdara plays a desperate mother who borrows the house of her ex-parents-in-law on the Costa Azul in order to spend a few days there on holiday with her children. This will be the Belgian auteur’s third time taking part in the festival, where he scooped the Silver Shell for Best Director with The White Knights [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Joachim Lafosse
film profile] and to which he returned with A Silence [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Joachim Lafosse
film profile].

A recently divorced father and his two teenage children enjoy staying on a camping site for a seemingly pleasant holiday in Ungrateful Beings, which marks Slovenian helmer Olmo Omerzu’s first time in the festival's competition, after partaking in the New Directors sidebar with his second feature, Family Film [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Olmo Omerzu
film profile]. With his debut, A Night Too Young [+see also:
trailer
interview: Jiří Konečný
film profile], he was selected for the Berlinale Forum, and with his third movie, Winter Flies [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Olmo Omerzu
film profile], he won Best Director at Karlovy Vary in.

Argentinian actress-screenwriter-director Dolores Fonzi, who made her debut behind the camera with Blondi [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Dolores Fonzi
film profile] two years ago, which was screened in the festival's Horizontes Latinos section, will be competing with her second directorial outing. Belén, which once again stars Fonzi herself, recreates a true story about a lawyer from Tucumán who fights to secure the freedom of a young woman who has been locked up in prison after suffering a miscarriage.

Meanwhile, Chinese director Xiaoyu Qin will be at the Basque event to present his first fiction feature, Her Heart Beats in Its Cage, which recreates a true story with its original protagonists: it revolves around a woman who, after spending a decade behind bars for killing her husband, is reunited with her ten-year-old son. And after making his debut in 2003 with Truth, US helmer James Vanderbilt will be partaking with his movie Nuremberg, an adaptation of Jack El-Hai's book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist in which Oscar winner Rami Malek breathes life into the real-life character of Douglas Kelley, a US psychiatrist who evaluated 22 Nazis, including Hitler’s right-hand man, Hermann Göring (played by Russell Crowe).

On the other hand, standing out in the Special Screenings sidebar is the feature-length directorial debut by actress Juliette Binoche (who won an Oscar for The English Patient): IN-I in Motion, a non-fiction flick that revisits her experience in In-I, the hybrid dance-theatre show that the thesp staged in 2007 together with dancer and choreographer Akram Khan. Also joining the sidebar is Climbing for Life, based on the true story of Japanese mountaineer Junko Tabei, who was the first woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest. Its director, Junji Sakamoto, was behind films such as Face, which competed in San Sebastián in 2000 and scooped the Youth Award.

Here is the full list of films:

Competition

27 Nights – Daniel Hendler (Argentina) (opening film)
Ballad of a Small Player – Edward Berger (UK/Germany)
The Fence – Claire Denis (France)
Two Pianos – Arnaud Desplechin (France)
Belén – Dolores Fonzi (Argentina)
Maspalomas – José Mari Goenaga, Aitor Arregi (Spain)
Good Valley Stories – José Luis Guerín (Spain/France)
SAI: Disaster – Kentaro Hirase, Yutaro Seki (Japan)
Franz [+see also:
trailer
film profile] – Agnieszka Holland (Czech Republic/Germany/Poland/France/Turkey)
Six Days in Spring - Joachim Lafosse (Belgium/France/Luxembourg)
The Currents – Milagros Mumenthaler (Switzerland/Argentina)
Ungrateful Beings - Olmo Omerzu (Czech Republic/Slovenia/Poland/Slovakia/Croatia/France)
Los Tigres – Alberto Rodríguez (Spain)
Sundays – Alauda Ruiz de Azúa (Spain/France)
Nuremberg - James Vanderbilt (USA)
Couture – Alice Winocour (France/USA)
Her Heart Beats in Its Cage – Xiaoyu Qin (China)

Out of Competition

Winter of the Crow – Kasia Adamik (Poland/UK/Luxembourg) (closing film)
Un fantasma en la batalla – Agustín Díaz Yanes (Spain)
Anatomía de un instante – Alberto Rodríguez (Spain) (series)

Special Screenings

Bocas de cielo – Koldo Almandoz (Spain) (series)
Karmele – Asier Altuna (Spain)
IN-I in Motion – Juliette Binoche (France)
Flores para Antonio – Isaki Lacuesta, Elena Molina (Spain)
La suerte – Paco Plaza, Pablo Guerrero (Spain) (series)
Climbing for Life - Junji Sakamoto (Japan)

(Translated from Spanish)