San Sebastián 2019
Monos, Alejandro Landes (2019)
Nestled on the film festival calendar after the spectacle of Venice and the industry extravaganza of Toronto, Donostia Zinemaldia - San Sebastián International Film Festival casts an unassuming profile, a respite of pintxo-eating and caña-drinking betwixt screenings and surf-gazing. Yet the Basque festival boasts a formidable slate of discoveries, most notably works from emerging directors in the Latin American world.
The specter of US imperialism loomed large at the 67th San Sebastián International Film Festival, rippling through the works of established and new filmmakers alike. Patricio Guzmán's poetic and poignant La cordillera de los sueños completes his latest trilogy on Pinochet's reign—tracing the aftershocks of global capitalism, resource extraction, political violence, and the collective refusal to forget—imagined from the vantage point of Chile's eastern border, the immovable Andes. Guatemalan directors César Díaz and Jayro Bustamante's respective films Nuestras madres and La Llorona offer diverse perspectives on how another CIA-backed coup—Guatemala, 1954—continues to reverberate throughout the nation. In the former, a young forensic anthropologist labors to exhume and document the remains of political and indigenous victims found in mass graves; in the latter, a ghost haunts the home of a retired Guatemalan general being tried for war crimes.
Pablo Larraín's pulsing, atmospheric Ema delves into the ambivalent psyche of a sexually-fluid female reggaeton-dancer in the Chilean port-town of Valparaíso, while David Zonana's elegant and unnerving Mexico City-set Mano de obra articulates the shifting power dynamics within a group of construction workers in the wake of tragedy. Both Disco, Jorunn Myklebust Syversen's dynamic study of a young girl drawn into a radical Christian sect in contemporary Norway, and Małgorzata Szumowska's The Other Lamb, a wilderness-set art-house horror film in which a young girl revolts against her tribe's Jesus-like leader, suggest a burgeoning trend in the female-helmed religious cult film.
Below are Filmatique's Top Films of the 2019 San Sebastián International Film Festival:
A Dark Dark Man, Adilkhan Yerzhanov
Adults in the Room, Costa Gavras
Algunas bestias (Some Beasts), Jorge Riquelme Serrano
Das Vorspiel (The Audition), Ina Weisse
Disco, Jorunn Myklebust Syversen
Ema, Pablo Larraín
La cordillera de los sueños, Patricio Guzmán
Lhamo and Skalbe, Sonthar Gyal
La Llorona, Jayro Bustamante
Mano de obra (Workforce), David Zonana
Mientras dure la guerra (While at War), Alejandro Amenábar
Monos, Alejandro Landes
Nematoma (Invisible), Ignas Jonynas
Nuestras madres (Our Mothers), César Díaz
Noura's Dream, Hinde Boujeema
The Other Lamb, Małgorzata Szumowska
Parasite, Bong Joon-ho
Sister, Svelta Tsortsorkova
So Long, My Son, Wang Xiaoshuai
Temblores (Tremors), Jayro Bustamante
Ema, Pablo Larraín (2019)