San Sebastian round-up

Karen Krizanovich samples the delights of the Spanish film festival.

Sep 22 2005

Like the plain middle sibling stuck between a glamorous attention-seeking sister (Venice Film Festival) and the dull if dutiful brother (Viennale), San Sebastian's cinematic charms don't leap out at you; but this festival – set in one of the most charming cities in Spain – is there if you take the time to look.

Officially known as Donostia San Sebastian Nazioarteko Zinemaldia Festival Internacional De Cine, San Sebastian replaced the Hollywood fare of Venice and Cannes with a more esoteric roster of hard-to-categorise films, along with an expected and welcome diet of Spanish-language films, the latter supplying a nifty visual accompaniment to the distinctive Basque-style tapas served in the city's 'pinchos' bars.

That each bar has its own edible speciality (ie Aralar Bar on 10 Parte Vieja has superb deep fried calf brains on baguette) is a secret which has keep film-lovers fat, happy and capable of spending many hours sitting in the darkness of the 3000-seat Velodrome Theatre at the city's Kursaal Centre; San Sebastian's equivalent of our South Bank in one strikingly angular building.

With the jury this year headed by the not-very-visible jury president Anjelica Huston, along with award-winning French writer/director Claude Miller and legendary production designer Dean Tavoularis, San Sebastian corrals films into tidy groups, beginning with the official competition section, which must only contain films that have not competed elsewhere.

Opening with the lizard-themed Spanish drama 'Obaba' and closing with Anthony Hopkins's vehicle 'The World's Fastest Indian', by Kiwi director Roger Donaldson, the films in official competition ranged from a very American-feeling Chinese film, 'Sunflower', by director Zhang Yang, to the touching mature romance of 'Je Ne Suis Pas Là Pour Etre Aimé'.

The challenging Falkland drama 'Iluminados por el Feugo' is a festival favourite not only for its daring 'Nam-style treatment of the conflict, but also for its completion history with the 'films in progress' section previously.

The talk of the festival so far is the Argentinian thriller 'El Auro', an innovative tale of a quiet epileptic taxidermist (played by Ricardo Darin), whose hobby of planning the perfect crime becomes a reality when a hunting trip goes wrong. Penned 20 years ago by director Fabián Bielinsky, this is the much-anticipated second feature from the director of 'Nine Queens'.

Taxidermy rears its ugly head yet again in Terry Gilliam's 'Tideland'. The story of a child that is definitely not for children, this heavy-going load of whimsy will try even the most ardent Gilliam fan.

Already popular when shown in Toronto, Michael Winterbottom's 'A Cock and Bull Story' – a behind-the-scenes tale based on 'Tristram Shandy' – went down surprisingly well with the crowd, leaving the director himself basking in glory afterwards at the fan-surrounded bar of the Hotel Maria Cristina, already anticipating the obstacles he's facing filming in Iran for his TV feature 'The Road to Guantánamo'.

The Zabaltegi section welcomed popular winners from other festivals, as well as features by new directors. As such, it typically offers sanctuary for 'difficult' products – films that are not only sometimes hard-to-watch but also hard-to-see, in a more literal sense.

Mexican director Carlos Armella's documentary 'Toro Negro' courted controversy by featuring a woman being beaten by her bullfighter boyfriend, who appeals to the film-maker to intervene.

Still looking for distribution in the UK is 'Shadowboxer', a melodramatic and wildly uneven story of gangland violence and redemption, salvaged by credible performances from Helen Mirren and Cuba Gooding Jr, who are surprisingly entertaining as a pair of assassins. Lee Daniels (who made his name as the producer of the Oscar-winning 'Monster's Ball' and 'The Woodsman') makes an uneasy transition into the director's chair with this splashy debut.

In the Zabaltegi section – a sort of cinematic free-for-all – 'Dreaming Lhasa' screened, a semi-documentary tale about Tibetan exiles in India. Co-directed by the husband-and-wife team of Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam, it follows a young American/Tibetan woman as she helps an ex-monk in his search for a man who is thought to be dead, although a screaming Tibetan psychic believes he is alive.

Preserving her reputation for attention-grabbing titles, Mongolian film-maker Byambasuren Davaa – the director of the Oscar-nominated 'The Story of the Weeping Camel' – presented 'The Cave of the Yellow Dog'. This thesis film, made before 'Weeping Camel', is the charming and simple tale of a Mongolian nomad girl who wants to keep a stray puppy, but whose father believes it will bring them bad luck.

Along with special Latin-based categories and the 'films in progress' section, where unfinished films can show off their wares in the hope of raising completion cash, retrospectives proved part of the festival's attempts at crowd-pleasing, although an ill-timed look at the work of the great director Robert Wise unhappily opened the same week he died.

As a testament to his skill, many of his screenings were sold out – a situation that didn't exactly apply to Abel Ferrera's retrospective. His latest film, 'Mary', a sour and pretentious look at the effect of religion on a variety of media types, opened the Zabaltegi section, illustrating the fest's all-embracing attitude.

If nothing else, San Sebastian is noted for a wide score of experimental and accessible, unpopular and popular cinema. The fact that it will close with Woody Allen's crowd-pleasing British-set 'Match Point' proves that comedy may not make friends, but that those in Northern Spain certainly know how to put bums on seats. With San Sebastian, good cinema doesn't have to hurt.

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