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Basque cinema is making its presence felt across San Sebastián this year. The festival’s 74th edition, running Sept. 18-26, features 31 titles with Basque production involvement, with 19 world premieres competing for
the Irizar Basque Film Award. Spread across the Official Selection, New Directors, Zabaltegi-Tabakalera, Perlak, Zinemira, Made in Spain, the Velodrome and other strands, the lineup stretches from historical thrillers and intimate first features to animation, music documentaries and international auteur collaborations.
Among the established names, David Pérez Sañudo brings period thriller “The Harvester” (“Sacamantecas”), starring Goya winners Patricia López Arnaiz and Antonio de la Torre, while Koldo Almandoz returns with funeral parlor comedy-drama “The Last Goodbye” (“Azken agurra”). “Cell 211” director Daniel Monzón heads back to the final years of Francoism with “Pray for Us” (“Ruega por nosotras”). A newer generation is prominent too: Javier Giner follows his series “I, Addict” with feature debut “This Solitude” (“Esta soledad”), while Nitya López Saitua turns a childhood family rupture into an experiment in reconstruction and memory in Zinemira title “Family Drill” (“Simulacro”).
The slate also points well beyond the Basque Country. Tsai Ming-liang brings his slow-stepping Walker to San Sebastián in “Dust” (“Weichen”), a Spanish-Taiwanese collaboration selected for Zabaltegi-Tabakalera. Nanni Moretti’s “It Will Happen Tonight” (“Sucederá esta noche”), meanwhile, arrives in Perlak with Basque company Irusoin among its producers and a score by longtime Pedro Almodóvar collaborator Alberto Iglesias.
Across many of the selections runs a concern with what survives — family memory, musical communities, cultural traditions and cinema itself. Farewell films devoted to Basque rock band Gatibu and musician Fermin Muguruza sit alongside “Bringing Shadows to Light” (“Itzalak argitzen”), which follows the restoration of four Basque-language films from the 1980s. That conversation between generations extends to Klasikoak, where Ana Díez’s restored “Ander eta Yul” returns to the festival where it premiered way back in 1988.
Taken together, the films chart a Basque industry working simultaneously outward and inward: building international co-productions and relationships with major auteurs while returning to local history, language, and how the place itself can conjure material.
We profile a selection of the titles below:
Official Selection — Special Screenings
“The Harvester” (“Sacamantecas”) Dir. David Pérez Sañudo (La Claqueta PC, Amania Films, La Cruda Realidad, Caviar)
The director of “Ane” turns to a darker chapter of Álava’s history. As the Third Carlist War winds down, women are found strangled outside Vitoria and a victim’s sister demands justice. Goya winners Patricia López Arnaiz and Antonio de la Torre lead a period thriller pitting her determination against depleted police resources and authorities keen to suppress the scandal. Pérez Sañudo’s third feature brings a woman’s struggle to be heard into the machinery of historical crime.
“The Last Goodbye” (“Azken agurra”) Dir. Koldo Almandoz (Garabi Films, Txintxua Films)
Running a funeral business offers little preparation for sorting out your own life. Almandoz’s protagonist has lost his driving license through drink, fallen for a trainee 25 years younger and borrowed money from a retired boxer who wants it back. His daughter, meanwhile, is losing her illusions about him. Iñigo Azpitarte and Izaro Nieto head an existential comedy-drama whose secular funeral parlor provides an apt setting for a man making a mess of living.
“Pray for Us” (“Ruega por nosotras”) Dir. Daniel Monzón (Arcadia Motion Pictures, Amalur Pictures, Noodles Production)
Monzón, whose “Cell 211” swept eight Goyas including best film and director, enters another institution built around punishment. In 1974, rebellious 19-year-old Ana is handed over by her father to Spain’s Women’s Protection Board and confined in a Madrid reformatory run by nuns. Zoe Bonafonte stars opposite Manuela Calle in a drama where friendship becomes a means of survival under brutal discipline. A Spanish-French production returning to the closing years of Francoism through the young women subjected to its moral policing.
New Directors
“This Solitude” (“Esta soledad”) Dir. Javier Giner (Balance Media Entertainment, La Embajada TV, Basajaun Filmak)
After five years together, Leo and Lorea have separated, though love may not have disappeared. He cares for an ailing father; she struggles through poorly paid jobs and personal upheaval. Oriol Pla and Marina Salas lead Giner’s feature debut, following his series “I, Addict.” Set in Bilbao, this New Directors entry places a fractured relationship within a wider generational predicament: the exhausting pursuit of security, emotional connection and an adulthood that keeps slipping out of reach.
Zabaltegi-Tabakalera
“Dust” Dir. Tsai Ming-liang
Tsai, winner of Venice’s Golden Lion for “Vive L’Amour,” brings his Walker to San Sebastián. In the eleventh installment of the short series, Lee Kang-sheng’s slow-moving figure passes the Comb of the Wind, a Basque farmhouse and a rock bar, placing his measured progress against the rhythms of everyday life. “The way he walks is extraordinarily beautiful,” Ming-liang told Variety recently, “and the idea of slowness itself has great power.” Anong also returns, alongside an octogenarian farmer the director encountered by chance. Produced by Homegreen Films and Vitrine Filmes, this largely wordless Spanish-Taiwanese collaboration gives the festival city a place within Tsai’s continuing experiment with cinematic time.
“HAMALAU gau” Dir. Oskar Alegria Suescun (Emak Bakia Films, EITB–Euskal Irrati Telebista)
Fourteen nights, echoing the fourteen apostles Jorge Oteiza placed on Arantzazu’s façade, structure Alegria’s nocturnal exploration of the Basque artist’s imagination. Inside the basilica, the filmmaker describes images to pianist Iñar Sastre, asking him to summon through music what he cannot see. The premise makes listening an act of creation. Selected for Zabaltegi-Tabakalera, the film approaches Oteiza through darkness, sound and the possibilities of an encounter between a filmmaker, a musician and a charged architectural space.
Perlak
“It Will Happen Tonight” (“Succederà questa notte”) Dir. Nanni Moretti (Fandango, Sacher Film, Pan Cinema, Playtime, BTeam Prods, Irusoin, IWHT AIE)
A bride walks onto a tennis court, removes her shoes and asks Matteo to play. Seven years later, he is still thinking about her. Louis Garrel and Jasmine Trinca star in the Palme d’Or-winning Moretti’s story of parallel lives, missed connections and a possible second chance. Arriving in Perlak from Venice, the Italian-French-Spanish production counts Basque outfit Irusoin among its producers with four-time Oscar nominee and 12-time Goya winner Alberto Iglesias composing the score.
Zinemira
“The Blind Ants” (“Inurri itsuak”) Dir. Igor Legarreta (Lamia Producciones, LAZONA Zinema, Lamia Films, LAZONA Producciones, Bruja del Norte Films AIE, Buendía Estudios Bizkaia, Sideral Cinema, Caviar Antwerp)
Coal promises salvation and threatens catastrophe in Zinemira’s opening film. When an English ship runs aground off Bizkaia in 1930, Sabas takes his children into the storm to salvage its cargo, ignoring his wife’s forebodings. Goya-winning “Maixabel” actor Urko Olazabal and Itziar Ituño head Legarreta’s adaptation of Ramiro Pinilla’s novel. The family’s battle to secure fuel for winter gives this Spanish-Belgian period drama its central tension: how far necessity can drive people, and what survival may ultimately cost them.
“Winnipeg, Seeds of Hope” (“Winnipeg, el barco de la esperanza”) Dir. Beñat Beitia and Elio Quiroga (Dibulitoon Studio, El Otro Film, Toni Marín Vila, Dibulitoon Factory AIE, Malabar Producciones)
A widowed father and his daughter flee Barcelona in 1939, only to encounter further suffering in France. Their escape route is the Winnipeg, the cargo ship chartered by Pablo Neruda and Parisian Quakers to carry Spanish refugees to Chile. Adapted from the graphic novel by writer Laura Martel and illustrator Antonia Santolaya, this animated Spanish-Chilean-Argentine production brings the Republican exodus down to a family’s scale. Víctor and Julia’s journey supplies the human thread through a history of displacement, solidarity and the possibility of starting again.
“300 Oaks” (“300 haritz”) Dir. Aitor Aranguren Ordoñez (Cinealtagama / MUGA)
The 300 oaks once required to build a farmhouse provide the starting point for Aranguren Ordoñez’s reflection on how identity survives by changing. In the crypt at Arantzazu, 23 chefs from Mahaia Kolektiboa meet artists in an immersive encounter centered on a deceptively simple question: How can a culture move forward without losing its origins? Food, art and architecture become ways of thinking about belonging in a film that treats tradition not as something fixed, but as something continually remade.
“Izarrak” dir. David Taberna and Iñigo Puerta (Zabalik 2000)
Five centuries of movement through the Basque Country’s ports, kitchens and fields underpin Taberna and Puerta’s documentary about how Basque gastronomy became an international reference point. Beginning with maritime expeditions departing Pasaia in search of spices and fortune and moving through the revolution of the New Basque Cuisine, the film connects culinary history with the people sustaining it today. Migrants arriving in Gipuzkoa and those working its land and sea place questions of identity, territory and renewal alongside the region’s celebrated food culture.
“Pedro Arrupe. I Survived the Atomic Bomb” (“Pedro Arrupe. Yo viví la bomba atómica”) Dir. Maite Ibáñez (New Servicing Media Euskadi)
Hiroshima seen from the ground provides the starting point for Ibáñez’s documentary about Bilbao-born Jesuit Pedro Arrupe. A witness to the atomic bombing on Aug. 6, 1945, the missionary offers a human perspective on an event so often represented by the distant mushroom cloud. The film centers the bodies beneath that image and those who tried to help them. Screening in Zinemira, it connects a Basque life with one of the defining catastrophes of the 20th century.
“Family Drill” (“Simulacro”) Dir. Nitya López Saitua (La Córnea Digital, Grisak Films, Mubox Studio)
A filmmaker returns to his childhood home and casts actors to replay the argument that ended his parents’ relationship when he was four. Iraia Elias and Miguel Garcés join López Saitua in an exercise where reconstruction gradually gives way to something less controllable. Improvisation exposes the filmmaking process, while repeated takes unsettle the distinction between what happened and what the director needs to imagine. A family rupture becomes an inquiry into cinema’s power to manufacture memory.
“Daughters of the Sea” (“Las hijas del mar”) Dir. Gemma Gonzalez Martinez (Ladyred Producciones, Bassim Pictures)
The women divers of South Korea’s Jeju Island find distant counterparts among the net makers, boat women and rowers of the Basque coast. Gonzalez Martinez’s Spanish-South Korean documentary follows these maritime communities across a geographical divide, tracing the working practices and shared values that connect them. At its center is women’s relationship with the sea: a source of livelihood, inherited knowledge and belonging. Zinemira hosts this exploration of two coastal cultures shaped by the waters around them.
“Gatibu, Without Saying Goodbye” (“Gatibu, agur esan barik”) Dir. Jabi Elortegi (Pausoka Entertainment)
After 25 years, Gatibu are leaving the stage. Elortegi follows the Basque rock band’s farewell tour, combining its public milestones with more private moments as the musicians bring a shared chapter to a close. The documentary’s subject extends to the audience that has grown older alongside them, making the tour a meeting point for personal and collective memory. A Zinemira selection about the passing of time, the work of sustaining a band and the decision to stop.
“My Father Alex” (“La maleta de Álex”) Dir. Alejandro Cortés Calahorra (Larrua Creaciones)
Beginning around the 10th anniversary of Álex Angulo’s death, his daughter Dodó returns from Taiwan to discover the man behind her memories. Adopted by the actor in China, she travels through Bilbao and Madrid, meeting relatives, friends and colleagues from his screen and stage career. Testimony and excerpts from his work build a portrait with two intertwined purposes: recovering an actor’s artistic legacy and helping a daughter reclaim her relationship with him. A documentary road movie shaped by absence and discovery.
“Txakun txakür” Dir. Elsa Oliarj-Inès (Solent Production, Limbus Filmak, Haruru Filmak)
Eight years spent filming the same group of children give Oliarj-Inès a long view of the playground’s changing alliances. Games become social roles; friendship becomes a negotiation over who belongs and who is left outside. Elise’s struggle for acceptance runs through this French-Spanish documentary, which asks how an identity develops under other people’s gaze. Selected for Zinemira, it approaches growing up through the small encounters in which children begin to learn the rules of a larger society.
“Un tal Karlos” Dir. Arantxa Aguirre (Bainet)
Nearly four decades of television have made Karlos Arguiñano a familiar presence in Spanish homes. Aguirre’s documentary asks how much that familiarity actually reveals. Following the chef into private spaces and situations outside his usual routine, she listens to Arguiñano and those closest to him, looking beyond the public performance. Zinemira’s closing film offers a change of vantage point on a figure whose combination of cooking and conversation has made him part of the country’s daily life.
“Septembers” (“Irailak”) Dir. Izaskun Arandia (Izar Films Europe, Ametza Films)
The identification of her great-grandfather’s remains in 2018 sends Arandia on a journey with her father to Burgos. His disappearance had remained a family mystery for decades; finding him opens a new search for the circumstances of his death. Produced by IZAR Films and Ametza Films, the documentary combines a present-day investigation with animation. Its starting point is intimate, but the questions extend across generations: what families inherit through silence, and what recovering a body can finally set in motion.
“Bringing Shadows to Light” (“Itzalak argitzen”) Dir. Koldo Almandoz and Gorka Bilbao (Berde Produkzioak, EITB–Euskal Irrati Telebista Media)
Four Basque-language films from the mid-1980s travel to Bologna for a second life. Almandoz and Bilbao follow their restoration at L’Immagine Ritrovata, alongside the filmmakers whose work is being recovered. Initiated in 2025 by the Basque government, EITB and the Basque Film Archive, the undertaking becomes the subject of an EITB documentary. Its focus gives cultural preservation a practical dimension: the journeys, specialist labor and patient attention required to return a piece of cinema history to the screen.
Made in Spain
“Better Class” (“Altas capacidades”) Dir. Victor García León (Buenapinta Media, Think Studio, Colosé Producciones, Sayaka Producciones, Altas Capacidades Película AIE, Cimarrón)
An elite school place for their son offers Alicia and Gonzalo a tempting route into a wealthier world. They insist the move is about the boy’s gifts; the prospect of better contacts and higher earnings suggests other motives. Marián Álvarez and Israel Elejalde lead García León’s class comedy, co-written with Borja Cobeaga. Selected for Made in Spain after Málaga, it puts parental aspiration under pressure, asking how readily cherished principles can bend when social advancement comes within reach.
Velódromo
“Karateka” Dir. Aritz Moreno (Señor y Señora, Atresmedia Cine, Apaches Entertainment, Colosé Producciones, Wrong Men)
Olympic gold at 39 supplies the destination for Moreno’s dramatization of Sandra Sánchez’s sporting life. With coach and partner Jesús del Moral beside her, Sánchez challenges expectations about age and opportunity in a discipline dominated by Japan. Andrea Ros, Patrick Criado, Ernesto Alterio and Pilar Castro feature in the Spanish-Belgian production. A Velódromo presentation, the film builds its sports story around the partnership behind an exceptional career, bringing training, ambition and a shared life into the same arena.
“Go!azen 13” Dir. Itziar Gomez Sarasola and Aitor Osa Eiguren (Pausoka Entertainment)
Basakabi opens its doors for another summer as the Basque Country’s first locally produced musical series reaches Season 13. With Xabier Zabaleta as showrunner, “Go!azen” returns to its camp setting for fresh adventures, humor and versions of contemporary and classic Basque songs. The Velódromo hosts the season opener, continuing a festival platform for a television property that began as a standalone TV movie. Its enduring combination places young performers and Basque popular music before a family audience.
“Muguruza FM 40 Tour” Dir. Ander Merino Etxebeste and Fermin Muguruza (Talka Records)
Four decades after first taking the stage, rock star Fermin Muguruza sets out on his final large-scale tour. Co-directed with Ander Merino Etxebeste, the documentary follows packed concerts, road miles and encounters along the way, connecting his solo career with the legacy of Kortatu and Negu Gorriak. Music and cultural resistance share the billing. Presented at the Velódromo, the film records a traveling community formed around songs that have passed between generations, carrying a history of collective commitment with them.
Culinary Zinema
“Subijana: The Man Behind the Moustache” (“Subijana, más allá de un bigote”) Dir. Jorge Fernández Mayoral and Jesús Javier Ruiz Aquerreta (Visual Comunicación)
Pedro Subijana’s familiar mustache supplies the title, but Fernández Mayoral and Ruiz Aquerreta look beyond the public image to more than half a century of cooking and influence. One of the driving forces of New Basque Cuisine, Subijana has maintained three Michelin stars at Akelarre since 2007. The subject is approached through both his professional career and the legacy now passing to another generation. The doc places him within the broader transformation of Basque gastronomy, tracing the ideas, work and continuity behind an instantly recognizable figure.
Klasikoak
“Ander eta Yul” (“Ander y Yul”) Dir. Ana Díez (Igeldo Zine Produkzioak)
Díez’s debut and the first feature directed by a woman in the Basque film industry and winner of the Goya for Best New Director returns to the festival where it premiered. Newly restored in 4K by the Basque Film Archive and EITB. Released from prison, Ander comes home to family ties he had severed and a reunion with his closest friend, Yul. Their friendship unfolds within a society that constrains both men’s futures.
RTVE Galas
“Burundanga” Dir. Jose Corbacho (Simulacre AIE, Minoria Absoluta, Kowalski Films, Feelgood Media)
Pregnant and unsure of her boyfriend’s feelings, Berta follows a friend’s advice and slips him a supposed truth drug. The confession she gets is considerably bigger than expected: Manel belongs to an ETA cell. Corbacho adapts Jordi Galceran’s stage comedy, with Adriana Torrevejano, Carol Rovira and Marcel Borràs among the cast. Presented in the RTVE galas, the film turns a search for romantic reassurance into political farce, with the couple’s future suddenly complicated by an altogether different secret.
EITB Gala
“Blood Moon” (“Odol ilargia”) Dir. David R. Losada (Baleuko)
A school reunion brings Julen face to face with a past he had little enthusiasm for revisiting. Among the former classmates is Ibai, once his closest childhood friend, released from prison that very day after serving time for a murder he never explained. Created and directed by Losada, this EITB gala series turns a 10-year reunion into the starting point for unresolved questions. Old friendships provide the emotional stakes; an unexplained killing supplies the mystery pulling them back together.
