Filmmakers including Mati Diop, Leos Carax, Arnaud Desplechin, Dea Kulumbegashvili, Elena López Riera, Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias and Jane Schoenbrun to participate in Zabaltegi-Tabakalera

San Sebastian Festival’s most open zone will include the world premiere of films directed by Nino Benashvili, Wu Lang, Yoyo Liu and Maximiliano Schonfeld.

The remaining titles are, in the main, feature-length and short films to have been awarded or programmed at Cannes, Berlín, Locarno, Rotterdam, Sundance and Venecia, among other festivals.

Opening with Dahomey by Mati Dop and closing with Aprili / April by Dea Kulumbegashvili, the Zabaltegi-Tabakalera section of the San Sebastian Festival’s 72nd edition will include names such as those of Leos Carax, Arnaud Desplechin, Elena López Riera, Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias and Jane Schoenbrun, as well as films awarded or programmed at festivals including Cannes, Berlin, Locarno, Rotterdam, Sundance and Venice. Others screening as world premieres are those of Nino Benashvili, Wu Lang, Yoyo Liu and Maximiliano Schonfeld. The section will include the participation of 23 titles competing for the Zabaltegi-Tabakalera Award: thirteen feature films (two of which come from the Ikusmira Berriak project residency), two medium-length movies and eight shorts.

Dahomey, the non-fiction to have bagged Mati Diop (Paris, 1982) the Golden Bear for Best Film at the last Berlinale, addresses the debate sparked by the return to Africa of 26 treasures from the Kingdom of Dahomey looted in 1892 by the French colonial troops. The film opening Zabaltegi-Tabakalera marks the return of the director who formerly participated in the section with Atlantique / Atlantics (2019) after having landed the Grand Jury Prize in Cannes.

Closing the section is Aprili / April, second feature from Dea Kulumbegashvili (Georgia, 1986), whose debut, Dasatskisi / Beginning (2020) carried off four accolades in San Sebastian: the Golden Shell for Best Film, the Silver Shells for Best Director and Best Actress and the Jury Prize for Best Screenplay. Kulumbegashvili, who had the opportunity to enjoy an artistic residence in Tabakalera in 2021 and presided over the Official Jury that same year, will compete at the coming Venice Mostra with this film about an obstetrician accused of negligence. The Georgian moviemaker has used images inspired by her installation Captives, one of the audiovisual pieces including in the 2022 Tabakalera exhibition, Vive le cinéma!

The Ataka51 collective, coming from Moscow and settled in Paris, with members Dimitri Gorbaty, Philipp Ivanov, Alex Epikhov and Sergei Medvedev, produces short films, videos and live performances. Their latest work, Gimn chume / Hymn of the Plague, takes place in an old Soviet recording studio where the musicians try to record a composition based on Pushkin’s work, A Feast in Time of Plague. The film carried off the Silver Pardino in Locarno Festival’s international short film competition.

The Georgian writer/director Nino Benashvili (Tbilisi, 1993) will compete with the world premiere of her short film Sadac dro idga / Where Time Stood Still. The film depicts the life of a widowed mother and her daughter in an isolated village in the Caucasus mountains, which is interrupted by the arrival of a foreign traveller in need of shelter. Her previous work, the documentary short film Children of Nikozi (2021), won the Bronze Remi at the WorldFest-Houston International Film Festival.

In C’est pas moi / It’s Not Me, a medium-length film included in the Cannes Première section of the French Festival, Leos Carax (Suresnes, 1960) paints a self-portrait taking a free-form look at his filmmaking background. Boasting a career spanning more than four decades, Carax has participated in and won awards at myriad events with titles such as Boy Meets Girl (1984), Mauvais sang (Bad Blood, 1986), Les amants du Pont-Neuf (1991), Holy Motors (2012) and Annette (2021). Another of his films, Pola X (1999), screened as part of the themed retrospective: Backwash: The cutting edge of French cinema at the San Sebastian Festival in 2009.

Two young girls talk about the recent mysterious disappearance of a third in Leela, the Indian short film selected at the Rotterdam International Film Festival. Tanmay Chowdhary (Kolkata, 1990) has directed this film after his previous work, Madhu / Honey (2022), was screened at several international festivals, including a showcase at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. 

Also programmed in the Backwash season was Rois et reine (Kings & Queen, 2004), the film that saw the participation in the Venice Mostra of Arnaud Desplechin (Roubaix, 1960), a regular author at the Cannes competition where he has shown works including La sentinelle (The Sentinel, 1992), Esther Kahn (2000) and Frère et soeur (Brother and Sister, 2022). Desplechin, who, following his stint at the Quinzaine des Cinéastes, was programmed in Perlak with Trois souvenirs de ma jeunesse (My Golden Days 2015), comes to Zabaltegi-Tabakalera with Spectateurs ! / Filmlovers!, a celebration of the magic of the cinema screened out of competition at the last Festival de Cannes.

Palestinian-Danish filmmaker Mahdi Fleifel (Dubai, 1979) participated in the Cannes Quinzaine des Cinéastes with his first fiction feature film, To a Land Unknown, which follows two refugees as they hatch an extreme plan to obtain fake passports and escape from Athens. His short films have been showcased at festivals such as Cannes, Berlin and IDFA (Amsterdam), while his earlier work, A World Not Ours (2012), a feature-length documentary, premiered in Toronto and screened in the Panorama section of the Berlin Festival, where it was awarded the Peace Film Prize.

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, in which the Belgian Johan Grimonprez (Roeselare, 1962) talks about jazz and decolonization, landed a Special Jury Prize for its cinematic innovation in the world documentary section at Sundance Festival. A multimedia artist and filmmaker, Grimonprez has directed short and feature films such as Double Take (2009) and Shadow World (2016), winner of the Best Documentary Award at Edinburgh Festival.

Kohei Igarashi (Shizuoka, 1983) will return to Zabaltegi-Tabakalera, where he participated with the feature-length La nuit où j'ai nagé / Oyogisugita Yoru / The Night I Swam (2017), co-helmed with Damien Manivel and premiered in the Orizzonti section of the Venice Festival, and the short film Suigyo no majiwari / Two of Us (2023). The latter precisely provided the starting point for the movie he is presenting this year at the Giornate degli Autori in Venice, Super Happy Forever, following two friends who return to a spa where one of them fell in love five years previously.

Also returning to the section is Wu Lang (Yiyang, 1991), the Chinese director who participated in last year’s edition with a feature film premiered in the Encounters section of the Berlinale, Xue yun / Absence (2023) and a short film Duan pian gu shí / Short Story (2023), respectively. This year he will present the world premiere of a new short film, Yao yuan de xia wu / Here Comes the Sun, opening when a rocket base disturbs the tranquillity of a fishing village.  

Viv Li (Beijing, 1990) landed a special mention in the student documentary section of the Amsterdam Documentary Film Festival (IDFA) with the short I Don't Feel at Home Anywhere Anymore (2020) and this year participated in the short film competition at Cannes with Across the Waters, set in a remote mining town.

Zabaltegi-Tabakalera will also host the world premiere of the Chinese short film Nai niu / Milky White, set in a remote rural area where a cow becomes the hope of an entire family. This is the directorial debut from Yoyo Liu (Hangzhou, 2002), who is currently studying Media Arts at Emerson College in the USA.  

Federico Luis (Buenos Aires, 1990) will participate with Cómo ser Pehuén Pedre / How to be Pehuén Pedre, whose lead character trains two actors to obtain their disability certificates. This short film included in the Visions du Réel competition is in direct dialogue with Luis’s feature debut, Simón de la montaña / Simon of the Mountain, winner of the Grand Prix at the Semaine de la Critique and programmed in this year’s Horizontes Latinos selection in San Sebastian.

Hiroshi Okuyama (Tokyo, 1995), who won San Sebastian’s Kutxabank New Directors Award with Boku wa Iesu-sama ga kirai / Jesus (2018), returns to the Festival with his second feature-length movie, included in Un Certain Regard at the Festival de Cannes. Coming with the title of Boku no Ohisama / My Sunshine, the movie narrates the connection between two young ice skaters with completely different personalities.

Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias will show Pepe, winner of the Silver Bear for Best Director at this year’s Berlinale. A hippopotamus stars in the latest film from the Dominican helmer who landed the Georges de Beauregard at the FID Marseille with his thesis film, Santa Teresa y otras historias / Santa Teresa & Other Stories (2015), going on to direct Cocote (Horizontes Latinos, 2017), his first feature outside academia, Best Film Award in the Signs of Life section at Locarno.

Having directed We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021), Jane Schoenbrun (New York, 1987) presents I Saw the TV Glow, premiered in the Midnight section of the Sundance Festival and programmed in the Panorama section at Berlin, among other events. The protagonist of this latest work from the North American director is a teen whose reality starts falling to pieces on discovering a mysterious nighttime TV show.

Sombra grande / Big Shadow, the non-fiction from Maximiliano Schonfeld (Crespo, 1982) about recovery of the Chaná language in the Entre Ríos province, participated in last year’s WIP Latam and will have its world premiere in Zabaltegi-Tabakalera. The Argentinian filmmaker opened Horizontes Latinos with Jesús López (2021), which had previously screened at Proyecta and in WIP Latam, and has formerly shown his works at Berlin, BAFICI, DocLisboa and Mar del Plata, among other festivals. During his participation in the Festival, Schonfeld will take the opportunity to present his video installation Sombra grande / Big Shadow in Tabakalera.

Hikaru Uwagawa (Hiroshima, 1996), a Japanese filmmaker who completed the post-graduate Filmmaking course at the Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola, comes to Zabaltegi-Tabakalera with his debut feature, Ulysses. Developed in the Ikusmira Berriak projects residency in 2023 and premiered in the First Film Competition section of FID Marseille, the film addresses three fragmented tales of everyday lives in different parts of the world set around the concept of home.

The selection also includes a number of titles previously announced: the medium-length film by Elena López Riera (Orihuela, 1982), Las novias del sur / Southern Brides, premiered at the Semaine de la Critique in Cannes; the second feature film from Michael Fetter Nathansky (Cologne, 1993), Alle die Du bist / Every You Every Me, winner of the two WIP Europa awards later premiered in the Panorama section of the Berlinale; the short by Izibene Oñederra (Azkoitia, 1979) Etorriko da (Eta zure begiak izango ditu) / When It Comes (It Will Have Your Eyes), premiered at Annecy, and the feature-length Monólogo colectivo / Collective Monologue, recently presented in Locarno by Jessica Sarah Rinland, who participated in Ikusmira Berriak with this project and will present an exhibition in Tabakalera on 17 September.

All of the films in Zabaltegi-Tabakalera, the section organised by the San Sebastian Festival and Tabakalera-International Centre for Contemporary Culture, compete for the Zabaltegi-Tabakalera Award, decided by a jury specifically composed for the purpose. The award comes with 20,000 euros divided between the director (6,000 euros) and the distribution company of the film in Spain (14,000 euros).