San Sebastian Festival 2023: Puan and La práctica will premiere in Official Competition

Maria Alché and Benjamin Naishtat run jointly powin which Marcelo Subiotto and Leonardo Sbaraglia They play two professors facing each other over a university professorship. Alché won the Horizontes Award with her first feature film, submerged family (2018), and is also a resident of this year’s Ikusmira Berriak program. For her part, Naishtat won the Silver Shell for Best Director with Red (2018), who also won the awards for best actor and best photography, and previously participated in the Horizontes Latinos section with history of fear (2014). Puan was selected for Proyecta 2021 and with her individual works Alché and Naishtat have visited other film festivals such as Berlin and Locarno.

Martin Rejtman will participate for the first time in the Official Section with La práctica, a comedy in which the actor Stephen Bigliardi He plays a yoga teacher immersed in a marital crisis. Several of the Argentine director’s previous films have passed through San Sebastián: Silvia Prieto (1999) was exhibited in the Made in Spanish section; The Magic Gloves (2004) and Two Shots (2014) were in Horizontes Latinos, and the short film Shakti (2019) was included in Zabaltegi-Tabakalera the year Rejtman presided over the Nest jury. Lastly, in 2020 his project El repartidor está en camino / Riders won the Eurimages Award for Co-Production Development at the Europe-Latin America Co-Production Forum.

French filmmaker Robin Campillo will compete for the first time in San Sebastián with the film L’île rouge (The Red Island), whose setting is the French colonization of Madagascar. His fourth work as a director comes after winning the Grand Prix of the Cannes Jury with 120 beats per minute (120 BPM) (120 beats per minute, Perlak, 2017). In 2009 his debut behind the camera, The Revenants (The Resurrection of the Dead, 2004), was included in the retrospective La contraola: novísimo cine francés, and in 2012 he appeared in the Official Selection as co-writer of Foxfire, by Laurent Cantet.

The director Raven Jackson will compete in San Sebastián with his debut, but his relationship with the Festival is close. On the one hand, she participated in the Nest section, the international short film competition for film students, with nettles (2018) and, on the other, in the program Ikusmira Berriak developed the film that he is presenting in this 71st edition, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, a lyrical exploration of the life of a woman in Mississippi that was released this year in the US section Sundance Dramatic Competition.

Joachim Lafosse he will return to the official competition with his tenth feature film, a silencea drama starring Emmanuelle Devos and Daniel Auteuil. In 2015, the director won the Silver Shell for Best Director for white knights (The White Knights), and two of his works have gone through the Perlak section: L’économie du couple (After us, 2016) and Les inquilles (A restless love, 2021).

After her debut with the film Quitters (2015), Noah Pritzker will visit San Sebastián for the first time to present his second feature film, Ex-Husbands, which portrays the sentimental ups and downs of several men from the same family. The cast of the film includes Griffin Dunne, James Norton, Miles Heizer, Rosanna Arquette, and Eisa Davis.

The director’s works Cristi Puiu they have gone through the Cannes and Karlovy Vary festivals, and The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (The death of Mr. Lazarescu, 2005), which in 2014 was included in the Eastern Promises retrospective. Portrait of Eastern Europe in 50 films, is considered a capital work of the new wave of Romanian cinema. In 2016 he participated in the Perlak section with Sieranevada, and this year he will be in the official competition with MMXX, which follows the adventures of a handful of wandering souls trapped at the crossroads of History.