The Spanish highlights at the 2025 San Sebastian Film Festival

Jose Luis Rebordinos, festival director of San Sebastian International Film Festival (SSIFF), is unequivocal: “I have worked at San Sebastian for 29 years, 14 of them as director. I’ve never seen anything like this in Spain, both in terms of quantity and quality.”

Spanish productions have always had a strong presence at the festival and this year the selection includes dozens of local productions and co-productions, including four world premieres in competition and more titles than usual throughout the official selection.

Jose Luis Guerin’s Good Valley Stories sees the director return to San Sebastian some 24 years after winning the special jury prize for In Construction. Good Valley Stories is a non-­fiction film documenting a suburb in Barcelona where different generations of migrants coexist. “It echoes In Construction and earlier Guerin works like Innisfree,” says Rebordinos.

Basque filmmakers Jose Mari Goenaga and Aitor Arregi are no strangers to San Sebastian either. Part of the Moriarti creative filmmaking team alongside Jon Garaño, they premiered feature Marco last year at Venice, but their films Flowers, The Giant and The Endless Trench all launched at the Spanish festival. Their latest, Maspalomas, has been selected for this year’s competition. It was shot in Basque and revolves around an elderly gay man who returns to San Sebastian after an accident to confront his past and a life back in the closet.

Also in competition is Los Tigres from genre director Alberto Rodriguez, a thriller about siblings who stumble on a cache of cocaine on board a cargo ship on the Andalusian coast. Rodriguez’s miniseries The Anatomy Of A Moment, about the failed 1981 military coup in Spain, is playing in the festival’s not in competition sidebar.

The fourth competition title is Sundays by Basque filmmaker Alauda Ruiz de Azua. It is the tale of a brilliant 17-year-old student who shocks her family on becoming a cloistered nun. Ruiz de Azua’s Spanish marital-drama mini­series Querer premiered in San Sebastian last year and went on to win the international competition grand prize at Series Mania in March.

Further Spanish films selected to play in official selection include Agustin Diaz Yanes’ She Walks In Darkness, inspired by the true story of an officer who infiltrated Basque terrorist group ETA.

There are also special screenings of Asier Altuna’s period drama Karmele, Koldo Almandoz’s thriller series Sky Mouths, the documentary Flores Para Antonio directed by Elena Molina and two-time Golden Shell winner Isaki Lacuesta, and the series Fate directed by Paco Plaza and Pablo Guerrero.

Festival favourites

Some Spanish productions playing at San Sebastian have already made their mark on the festival circuit. Guillermo Galoe’s Sleepless City won the SACD screening award in Cannes Critics’ Week and is screening in SSIFF’s Perlak; and Jaume Claret Muxart’s Strange River arrives in Zabaltegi-­Tabakalera after premiering in Venice’s Horizons. There are 28 titles in the Made In Spain section, including the latest films by Carla Simon, Oliver Laxe, Eva Libertad, Arantxa Echevarria, Belen Funes and Fernando Colomo. Two Spain-Latin America co-productions are in the Horizontes Latinos section: Diego Cespedes’ The Mysterious Gaze Of The Flamingo, which won the Un Certain Regard award at Cannes this year, and Ivan Fund’s Berlinale jury award winner The Message.

“Festivals like Cannes, Venice, Berlin and Toronto are extremely interested in Spanish cinema,” says Rebordinos, pointing to the selection of Laxe’s Sirât and Simon’s Romería in Cannes Competition earlier this year. “It shows the quality of the films being made in Spain right now.” 

• Spain special 2025: digital edition