The 73rd San Sebastián International Film Festival (September 19–27, 2025) returns with a compelling Official Selection marked by formal ambition, sociopolitical urgency, and an intensified focus on women-led narratives and cinematic deconstruction.
The Spanish festival’s coastal glamour gives way to a lineup where fractured identities, memory, and justice emerge as dominant motifs, often wrapped in elliptical structures or genre-inflected stylizations.
At the forefront is Agnieszka Holland’s unconventional epic biographical mosaic Franz, a sweeping reimagining of Franz Kafka’s life and psychic world. Structured as a kaleidoscope of fragments spanning Kafka’s years in Prague to his final days in Vienna, Franz reclaims the man behind the myth in a formally restless portrait.
Another heavy-hitter in the competition is Claire Denis, whose The Fence distills colonial legacies and masculine ego into a single night at a construction site in West Africa. Atmospheric and unrelenting, the film unfolds like a slow-burn thriller, with Denis’s characteristically elliptical style charting a descent into guilt and confrontation.
Argentine actor-turned-director Dolores Fonzi offers a quietly devastating procedural rooted in real events in Belén. The story of a woman criminalized for a miscarriage in rural Argentina, Fonzi’s feature merges character study with activist storytelling. Alice Winocour’s latest film, Couture, is set amid the haute couture clamor of Paris Fashion Week. Three interwoven female stories push the film beyond the runway into existential terrain: illness, identity, and the silent labor of women in the shadows.
Arnaud Desplechin brings Two Pianos, a chamber piece centered on music, mentorship, and the spectral past. Featuring a subdued, autumnal tone compared to his earlier maximalist dramas, the film explores the fraught reunion between a pianist and his former teacher, haunted by echoes of love and unresolved family trauma. Desplechin’s literary sensibility remains intact, but Two Pianos appears to lean into introspective melancholia.
This year’s competition is marked by geographic reach and thematic variety. From Qin Xiaoyu’s Her Heart Beats in Its Cage (China), a delicate mother-son reunion narrative shaped by incarceration and social stigma, to Alauda Ruiz de Azúa’s Los domingos, a quiet domestic drama about a young girl’s spiritual awakening and its ripple effect across a secular family, faith, isolation, and generational rupture play out on diverse cinematic stages.
British director Edward Berger (All Quiet on the Western Front) brings Ballad of a Small Player, a Macau-set tale of gambling, debt, and redemption, offering genre flair with existential undertones. Meanwhile, the duo behind Handia, Jose Mari Goenaga and Aitor Arregi, explore aging and queer identity in Maspalomas, where the return of a 76-year-old bon vivant to a retirement home in San Sebastián marks an unexpected confrontation with the past.
Japanese duo Yutaro Seki and Kentaro Hirase’s SAI: Disaster infuses high-concept mystery into a multi-strand narrative structure reminiscent of Kurosawa’s Rashomon, while Belgian filmmaker Joachim Lafosse offers the deceptively modest Six Days in Spring, a sun-drenched tale of motherhood and social class that culminates in an ambivalent rupture of innocence.
Daniel Hendler’s 27 Nights opens the Official Selection with the morally ambiguous case of an elderly matriarch involuntarily committed to a psychiatric facility. The Argentine director questions both mental health diagnosis and family greed through a lens of judicial and psychiatric ambiguity. With its enclosed settings and shifting sympathies, the film may resonate with viewers attuned to legal thrillers and intimate psychodrama.
Kasia Adamik’s Winter of the Crow, the closing film, situates personal peril within the larger machinery of 1981’s martial law in Poland. With a British academic as its unlikely protagonist, the film channels Cold War paranoia through the lens of surveillance, migration, and feminine resistance. A genre-leaning political thriller, it completes the competition’s arc of institutional critique and the blurred moralities of power.
As usual, the Perlak section aggregates critical darlings and festival heavyweights. Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague opens the section, a metafictional chronicle of the French New Wave’s birth via Breathless, crafted with his signature blend of playfulness and melancholy. Rebecca Zlotowski’s Vie privée, closing the Perlak section, brings Jodie Foster into a moody Parisian mystery centered on psychiatric ethics and the limits of patient trust.
Assayas’s The Wizard of the Kremlin, Baumbach’s sprawling ensemble Jay Kelly, and Lanthimos’s latest absurdist parable Bugonia are set to ignite global distribution conversations. Meanwhile, Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident and Raoul Peck’s Orwell: 2+2=5 insert socio-political urgency into the section’s typically arthouse-leaning selection. Sorrentino, Trier, Mendonça Filho, and François Ozon round out the Perlak line-up, while debut films such as The President’s Cake by Hasan Hadi and Little Amélie by Maïlys Vallade and Liane-Cho Han promise breakout potential.
A highlight of San Sebastián’s programming continues to be the Zabaltegi-Tabakalera section, its most boundary-pushing slate. This year, it opens with Sergio Oksman’s A Scary Movie, a self-reflexive docufiction set in a Shining-like hotel. The section includes Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s gothic meta-fable The Ice Tower, Harris Dickinson’s directorial debut Urchin, and Hlynur Pálmason’s sculptural, allegorical Joan of Arc, his second feature at the festival this year alongside Perlak’s The Love That Remains.
Films such as Blue Heron by Sophy Romvari and Under the Flags, the Sun by Juanjo Pereira fuse personal memory with national trauma. Others like György Pálfi’s Hen push absurdism into the animal kingdom. Emerging voices like Jaume Claret Muxart (Strange River) and Paula Tomás Marques (Two Times João Liberada) underline the festival’s commitment to incubating bold new European auteurs.
Closing the section is Fiume o morte! by Igor Bezinović, a hybrid documentary excavating the bizarre 16-month siege of Fiume led by Italian poet-warrior Gabriele D'Annunzio. It’s an inspired endnote for a section devoted to cinematic derangement, past and present.
Saoirse Ronan leads Bad Apples, Jonatan Etzler’s satirical debut about a teacher’s ethical descent, opening the New Directors competition. Yukari Sakamoto’s White Flowers and Fruits closes it with a supernatural boarding-school drama infused with grief and ghostly embodiment.
Official Selection (In Competition)
27 NOCHES / 27 NIGHTS by Daniel Hendler
Argentina – 2025 (World Premiere)
BALLAD OF A SMALL PLAYER by Edward Berger
UK – 2025 (World Premiere)
BELÉN by Dolores Fonzi
Argentina – 2025 (World Premiere)
LAS CORRIENTES / THE CURRENTS by Milagros Mumenthaler
Switzerland, Argentina – 2025 (World Premiere)
COUTURE by Alice Winocour
France, USA – 2025 (World Premiere)
LE CRI DES GARDES / THE FENCE by Claire Denis
France – 2025 (World Premiere)
DEUX PIANOS / TWO PIANOS by Arnaud Desplechin
France – 2025 (World Premiere)
LOS DOMINGOS / SUNDAYS by Alauda Ruiz de Azúa
Spain, France – 2025 (World Premiere)
FRANZ by Agnieszka Holland
Czech Republic, Germany, Poland – 2025 (World Premiere)
HISTORIAS DEL BUEN VALLE / GOOD VALLEY STORIES by José Luis Guerin
Spain, France – 2025 (World Premiere)
JIANYU LAIDE MAMA / HER HEART BEATS IN ITS CAGE by Qin Xiaoyu
China – 2025 (World Premiere)
MASPALOMAS by Jose Mari Goenaga, Aitor Arregi
Spain – 2025 (World Premiere)
NUREMBERG by James Vanderbilt
USA – 2025 (World Premiere)
SAI / SAI: DISASTER by Yutaro Seki, Kentaro Hirase
Japan – 2025 (World Premiere)
SIX JOURS CE PRINTEMPS-LÀ / SIX DAYS IN SPRING by Joachim Lafosse
Belgium, France, Luxembourg – 2025 (World Premiere)
LOS TIGRES by Alberto Rodríguez
Spain, France – 2025 (World Premiere)
UNGRATEFUL BEINGS by Olmo Omerzu
Czech Republic, Slovenia, Poland, Slovakia, Croatia, France – 2025 (World Premiere)
Opening Film (In Competition)
27 NOCHES / 27 NIGHTS by Daniel Hendler
Argentina – 2025 (World Premiere) Closing Film (Out of Competition)
WINTER OF THE CROW by Kasia Adamik
Poland, UK, Luxembourg – 2025 (World Premiere)
Out of Competition – Special Screenings
UN FANTASMA EN LA BATALLA / SHE WALKS IN DARKNESS by Agustín Díaz Yanes
Spain – 2025 (World Premiere)
FLORES PARA ANTONIO by Elena Molina, Isaki Lacuesta
Spain – 2025 (World Premiere)
IN-I IN MOTION by Juliette Binoche
France – 2025 (World Premiere)
KARMELE by Asier Altuna
Spain – 2025 (World Premiere)
LA SUERTE / FATE by Paco Plaza, Pablo Guerrero
Spain – 2025 (World Premiere)
TEPPEN NO MUKOU NI ANATA GA IRU / CLIMBING FOR LIFE by Junji Sakamoto
Japan – 2025 (World Premiere)
ZERU AHOAK / MOUTHS OF SKY by Koldo Almandoz
Spain – 2025 (World Premiere)
New Directors
BAD APPLES by Jonatan Etzler
UK – 2025 (World Premiere)
SHIRO NO KAJITSU / WHITE FLOWERS AND FRUITS by Yukari Sakamoto
Japan – 2025 (World Premiere)
ALDIĞIMIZ NEFES / AS WE BREATHE by Seyhmus Altun
Turkey, Denmark – 2025 (World Premiere)
ARO BERRIA by Irati Gorostidi Agirretxe
Spain – 2025 (World Premiere)
CHHORA JASTAI / SHAPE OF MOMO by Tribeny Rai
India, South Korea – 2025 (World Premiere)
CHUZHIE ZEMLI / FOREIGN LANDS by Anton Yarush, Sergey Borovkov
Russia – 2025 (World Premiere)
LA LUCHA / DANCE OF THE LIVING by José Alayón
Spain, Colombia – 2025 (World Premiere)
NAN FANG SHI GUANG / BEFORE THE BRIGHT DAY by Tsao Shih-Han
Taiwan – 2025 (World Premiere)
NI DE YAN JING BI TAI YANG MING LIANG / NIGHTTIME SOUNDS by Zhang Zhongchen
China – 2025 (World Premiere)
SI NO ARDEMOS, CÓMO ILUMINAR LA NOCHE / IF WE DON’T BURN, HOW DO WE LIGHT UP THE NIGHT by Kim Torres
Costa Rica, Mexico, France – 2025 (World Premiere)
THE SON AND THE SEA by Stroma Cairns
UK – 2025 (World Premiere)
VÆGTLOES / WEIGHTLESS by Emilie Thalund
Denmark – 2025 (World Premiere)
VÄRN / REDOUBT by John Skoog
Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands, Poland, Finland, UK, Switzerland – 2025 (World Premiere)
Zabaltegi-Tabakalera
UNA PELÍCULA DE MIEDO / A SCARY MOVIE by Sergio Oksman
Spain, Portugal – 2025 (World Premiere) – Opening Film
FIUME O MORTE! by Igor Bezinović
Croatia, Italy, Slovenia – 2025 (World Premiere) – Closing Film
DIEU EST TIMIDE / GOD IS SHY by Jocelyn Charles
France – 2025 (World Premiere)
MIHARASHI SEDAI / BRAND NEW LANDSCAPE by Yuiga Danzuka
Japan – 2025 (World Premiere)
URCHIN by Harris Dickinson
UK – 2025 (World Premiere)
ESTRANY RIU / STRANGE RIVER by Jaume Claret Muxart
Spain, Germany – 2025 (World Premiere)
LA FELICIDAD / HAPPINESS by Paz Encina
Paraguay – 2025 (World Premiere)
LA TOUR DE GLACE / THE ICE TOWER by Lucile Hadzihalilovic
France, Germany – 2025 (World Premiere)
NO ONE KNOWS I DISAPPEARED by Bo Hanxiong
China – 2025 (World Premiere)
THE SPECTACLE by Bálint Kenyeres
Hungary, France – 2025 (World Premiere)
EL ÚLTIMO ARREBATO / THE LAST RAPTURE by Marta Medina, Enrique López Lavigne
Spain – 2025 (World Premiere)
SCHWESTERHERZ / THE GOOD SISTER by Sarah Miro Fischer
Germany, Spain – 2025 (World Premiere)
TABI TO HIBI / TWO SEASONS, TWO STRANGERS by Sho Miyake
Japan – 2025 (World Premiere)
BARIAZIOAK / VARIATIONS by Lur Olaizola Lizarralde
Spain – 2025 (World Premiere)
SIEMPRE ES DE NOCHE / ALWAYS NIGHT by Luis Ortega
Argentina – 2025 (World Premiere)
KOTA / HEN by György Pálfi
Germany, Greece, Hungary – 2025 (World Premiere)
JÓHANNA AF ÖRK / JOAN OF ARC by Hlynur Pálmason
Iceland, Denmark, France – 2025 (World Premiere)
BAJO LAS BANDERAS, EL SOL / UNDER THE FLAGS, THE SUN by Juanjo Pereira
Paraguay, Argentina, USA, France, Germany – 2025 (World Premiere)
BLUE HERON by Sophy Romvari
Canada, Hungary – 2025 (World Premiere)
LURKER by Alex Russell
USA – 2025 (World Premiere)
SOL MENOR / APRIL TUNE by André Silva Santos
Portugal – 2025 (World Premiere)
LA GRÈVE / THE STRIKE by Gabrielle Stemmer
France – 2025 (World Premiere)
DUAS VEZES JOÃO LIBERADA / TWO TIMES JOÃO LIBERADA by Paula Tomás Marques
Portugal – 2025 (World Premiere)