Basque-ing in the Sun of San Sebastián

This year, I got to experience the foremost film festival in Spain for the first time.

Photo by Alejandra Cifre González on Unsplash

After Rotterdam earlier this year, my affiliation with The Film Verdict (register for free to receive the PDF version directly in your inbox) led to my being invited to another major European film festival for the first time: San Sebastián. For seven days, I got to enjoy the beautiful sights of the Basque seaside city, reconnect with a Spanish colleague I befriended in Poland a couple of months ago, and savor the culinary and cinematic delights on offer.

The weather was mostly on my side (it started raining the morning of my departure), as was the quality of the selection: the only real duds I saw were the opening film – Audrey Diwan’s intellectually intriguing but ultimately hollow reimagining of Emmanuelle – and Johnny Depp’s Modì, with everything else being, at the very least, ambitious enough to make the viewing worthwhile even if the movie itself wasn’t necessarily to my liking (Joshua Oppenheimer’s The End).