by Nick Taylor
THE END (2024) Joshua Oppenheimer
More film festival announcements yesterday, this time from the 72nd San Sebastián International Film Festival. They’ve unveiled their Main Competition slate, with more titles set to come, and it’s a damn exciting list of names. The festival runs from September 20th-28th, which probably means a lot of folks will sprint from Toronto to Spain...
Albert Serra’s Afternoons of Solitude, a documentary about Spanish matadors, is absolutely the selection I’m most excited about. Pacifiction and The Death of Louis XIV were amongst the best, most visually stunning films of their respective years, and I cannot wait to see what visual schemas and institutional insights he has in store for this milieu. If nothing else, the press photos look gorgeous. We also have The End, by the ingenious and maddeningly un-Oscared documentary filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer. A post-apocalyptic musical starring Tilda Swinton? I can’t fucking wait. Some of the most deranged scenes in The Act of Killing might very well have laid the foundations for this project.
HARD TRUTHS (2024) Mike Leigh
Justice for the castoffs snubbed by Venice, too! San Sebastián will be showing Audrey Diwan’s Emmanuelle, the latest in a series of French erotic dramas about a young woman who finds herself embroiled in several intense relationships. Diwan won the Golden Lion for Happening in 2021, making her omission from that festival goddamn baffling. Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, reuniting him with Secret & Lies actress Marianne Jean-Baptiste for the first time in over 30 years.
Miscellaneous films that seem cool as hell, listed in no particular order: Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Serpent’s Path, which I did not know until right this second was a French-language remake of his own film from 1998. Edward Berger’s Conclave, which stars Ralph Fiennes in some sort of papal conspiracy thriller. Diego Lerman’s indelibly titled The Man Who Loved UFOs, starring Leonardo Sbaraglia. Maite Alberdi’s El lugar de la otra, based on a true story of an author in the 1950’s shooting her husband to death in the middle of a diner.
Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl, because it’d be nice if Pamela Anderson got the opportunity to show everyone she’s a dynamite talent after so many years of documentaries and TV shows reappraising her tabloid history without really giving us a sense of who she is now.
AFTERNOONS OF SOLITUDE (2024) Albert Serra
SAN SEBASTIÁN OFFICIAL COMPETITION
Afternoons of Solitude, dir. Albert Serra
Bound in Heaven, dir. Huh Xin
Conclave, dir. Edward Berger
The End, dir. Joshua Oppenheimer
Emmanuelle, dir. Audrey Diwan
Last Breath, dir. Costa-Gavras
I Am Nevenka, dir. Iciar Bollaín
On Falling, dir. Laura Carreira
Glimmers, dir. Pilar Palomero
Hard Truths, dir. Mike Leigh
I, Addict, dirs. Javier Giner and Elena Trapé
The Last Showgirl, dir. Gia Copolla
El lugar de la otra (In Her Place), dir. Maite Alberdi
The Man Who Loved UFOs, dir. Diego Lerman
Querer, dir. Alauda Ruiz de Azúa
The Red Virgin, dir. Paula Ortiz
Serpent’s Path, dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa
The Wailing, dir. Pedro Martín Calero
When Fall is Coming, dir. François Ozon
WHEN FALL IS COMING (2024) François Ozon
What are you excited about from this lineup? Which films do you think will resonate outside the festival?