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British actor Tim Roth drew a big crowd and much applause with a masterclass at the 15th edition of the Luxembourg City Film Festival (LuxFilmFest) last week, in which he discussed such topics as his work with Tupac Shakur, Quentin Tarantino and Werner Herzog and how he prepared for his first TV role as a racist skinhead.

He was one of the big names attending the anniversary edition of the fest, along with the star-studded jury, which was led by Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof and also included Danish actress Trine Dyrholm (The Girl With the Needle, Poison), Austrian actress Valerie Pachner (Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, A Hidden Life), L.A.- and Luxembourg-based VFX expert Jeff Desom (Everything Everywhere All at Once), Spanish director Albert Serra (Afternoons of Solitude), and screenwriter Paul Laverty. The festival has also featured a masterclass by Oscar-winning filmmaker Alejandro Amenábar.

As part of his busy Luxembourg schedule,...

The 49th Hong Kong International Film Festival will kick off on April 10 with dual opening features, Japanese drama The Brightest Sun and Malaysia-Hong Kong co-production Pavane for an Infant. Berlin Golden Bear winner Dreams (Sex Love), directed by Norway’s Dag Johan Haugerud, will then bring the curtain down on the event on April 21 as the closing film. The festival’s lineup was unveiled Monday at a press conference at Hong Kong’s Filmart Content Market.

The Brightest Sun is filmmaker Tetsuya Nakashima’s adaptation of a novel by popular Japanese author Bunzo Uchikai. It’s the first film from Nakashima (Kamikaze Girls, The World of Kanako) in seven years. Pavane for an Infant, meanwhile, directed by Chong Keat Aun, is a drama exploring the issue of baby abandonment through the eyes of a female social worker (Malaysian-born Hong Kong actress Fish Liew).

Two local Hong Kong features have been...

Japanese filmmaker Nakashima Tetsuya’s The Brightest Sun and Malaysia-Hong Kong co-production Pavane For An Infant, directed by Chong Keat-Aun, will open this year’s Hong Kong International Film Festival (April 10-21).

Berlin Golden Bear winner Dreams (Sex Love), directed by Norway’s Dag Johan Haugerud, has been set as the closing film of the festival.

Two Hong Kong productions will receive Gala Screenings – Valley Of The Shadow Of Death, starring Anthony Wong, and Oliver Chan Siu-kuen’s Montages Of A Modern Motherhood, which played in Busan International Film Festival’s New Currents section and Tokyo International Film Festival’s Women’s Empowerment strand last year.

Hkiff’s Cinephile Paradise section will screen films such as Geng Jun’s Bel Ami, Vivian Qu’s Girls On Wire, Luca Guadagnino’s Queer, Luis Ortega’s Kill The Jockey and Yeo Siew Hua’s Stranger Eyes.

As previously announced, Hong Kong actor...

The New Year That Never Came, a drama about the Romanian revolution of 1989, written and directed by Bogdan Muresanu, won the Grand Prix, the top prize, at the 15th edition of the Luxembourg City Film Festival (LuxFilmFest) on Saturday.

“December 20, 1989. Romania is on the brink of revolution. The authorities are preparing New Year’s festivities as if nothing – or almost nothing – is happening, but the official façade begins to crack,” reads a synopsis for the film, which world premiered at Venice 2024. “Amid the fervor of the uprising, six lives will intersect over the course of an extraordinary day, which leads to the fall of Nicolae Ceaușescu and his regime.”

The fest jury, led by Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof, also included Danish actress Trine Dyrholm (The Girl With the Needle, Poison), VFX expert Jeff Desom (Everything Everywhere All at Once), Austrian actress Valerie Pachner (Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, A Hidden Life...

Luxembourgish actress, director, producer and TV host Désirée Nosbusch’s (Bad Banks) first fiction feature film as a director, Poison, starring British actor Tim Roth and Denmark’s Trine Dyrholm, finally premiered in her homeland. The 15th edition of the Luxembourg City Film Festival this week screened the drama, adapted from the play Gif by the Dutch author Lot Vekemans, that explores the reunion of a couple who meet again 10 years after a tragedy.

The screening was held outside the festival’s competition lineup, which is being judged by a jury led by Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof (The Seed of the Sacred Fig) and also includes Spanish auteur Albert Serra (Afternoons of Solitude), Dyrholm (The Girl With the Needle), VFX guru Jeff Desom (Everything Everywhere All at Once), Austrian actress Valerie Pachner (A Hidden Life), and screenwriter Paul Laverty (I, Daniel Blake). Instead, the movie unspooled in its Made in/With Luxembourg program.

Spanish auteur Albert Serra always gets strong reactions to his films, and that’s how he likes it. His latest, his first documentary, Afternoons of Solitude, has been no different. The bullfighting doc won the San Sebastian Film Festival’s Golden Shell for best film in the fall and continues to tour the festival circuit.

Right now, Catalonia’s Serra is attending the 15th edition of the Luxembourg City Film Festival where he is a member of the jury led by Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof that also includes the likes of VFX expert Jeff Desom (Everything Everywhere All at Once) and screenwriter Paul Laverty. The festival has also featured masterclasses by British star Tim Roth and Oscar-winning filmmaker Alejandro Amenábar.

Serra likes to hit viewers with images they will remember. “It’s all or nothing. The idea is that film has to be a real experience,” he told THR in...

Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light took top honors at the 2025 International Cinephile Society (Ics) Awards, winning best picture, director, and ensemble. The film, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and won the Grand Prix, has continued to receive recognition, earning nominations at the Golden Globes and BAFTAs.

The Ics recognized Kapadia’s film for its portrayal of “the voices, the faces, the night-lit trains of modern India.” The story follows women from different generations who form a quiet bond as they navigate personal and cultural challenges.

Nickel Boys, RaMell Ross’s Oscar-nominated drama about Black teenagers trapped in an abusive reform school, won best adapted screenplay for Ross and Joslyn Barnes, who based the script on Colson Whitehead’s novel. The film also received the cinematography award for Jomo Fray’s work.

Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths won multiple awards, including best actress for Marianne Jean-Baptiste,...

Payal Kapadia’s “All We Imagine as Light” triumphed at the 2025 International Cinephile Society (Ics) Awards, winning best picture, director and ensemble.

“All We Imagine as Light” world premiered at the Cannes Film Festival where it won the grand prize of the festival, along with a flurry of international awards. It also went on earn nominations at the Golden Globes and the BAFTA’s, among others.

The International Cinephile Society praised Kapadia’s film for highlighting “the voices, the faces, the night-lit trains of vibrant modern India.” The film revolves around a trip of women from different generations who form a quiet sisterhood to find their own peace amidst daunting personal and cultural issues.

“Nickel Boys,” RaMell Ross’s Oscar-nominated drama about Black teenagers caged in an abusive reform school, took best adapted screenplay honors for Ross and Joslyn Barnes, who wrote the script based on the book by Colson Whitehead.

Netflix has confirmed its acquisition of worldwide rights to Sundance prize-winning documentary The Perfect Neighbor, from director-producer Geeta Gandbhir.

Gandbhir won the directing award for US documentary at Sundance, where Netflix was reported to be in talks Cinetic Media to acquire the film for $5m. The film is also set to screen at this month’s SXSW and Cph:dox festivals and will get a Netflix premiere later this year.

Using police bodycam footage and investigative interviews, The Perfect Neighbor exposes the consequences of Florida’s ‘stand your ground’ law in a minor neighbourhood dispute that escalates into deadly violence.

Gandbhir...

San Sebastian Golden Shell winner Afternoons Of Solitude has landed a North American deal with Grasshopper Film.

‘Afternoons Of Solitude’: San Sebastian Review

Albert Serra’s documentary profiles the Peruvian-born celebrity bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey and blends the visceral thrill of the man versus bull encounter with a meditative filmmaking style.

The film received its US premiere at the New York Film Festival last autumn and will open June 27 at Film at Lincoln Center in New York, followed by other cities.

Ryan Krivoshey of Grasshopper Film negotiated the acquisition with Jean-Christophe Simon and Julien Razafindranaly of Films Boutique.

Afternoons Of Solitude...

The Dublin Film Festival came to an end at the weekend after one of its most varied programs yet. Guests visiting the event included deep-dive documentary-maker Alexandre O. Philippe, attending with his Texas Chain Saw Massacre meditation Chain Reactions; director Jason Buxton, there with his acclaimed Ben Foster-starring thriller Sharp Corner, soon to be released by Vertical; Albert Serra, supporting his surprise San Sebastian winner Afternoons of Solitude; Palestinian director Elia Suleiman, honored by a curated retrospective; and British ’60s pop-culture icon Twiggy, subject of Sadie Frost’s film of the same name. From closer to home, director Lorcan Finnegan and writer Thomas Martin brought their cult Cannes hit The Surfer, and the UK’s Polly Steele came with Four Letters of Love starring Helena Bonham Carter and Pierce Brosnan.

Under the always assured stewardship of artistic Gráinne Humphreys, the festival took a big swing by opening with The Return,...

Country in Focus: Spain at the Forefront, the European Film Market’s 2025 territory highlight, cuts two ways. TV will be spotlighted Feb. 17 in a Berlinale Series Market double-backed session, Spanish Thrillers, showcasing to works-in-progress titles, and Spanish Connection, where five projects are pitched to an industry audience.

For film, a Producers’ Showcase on Feb. 14 has 10 figures presenting their company and current projects at the Producers Hub. Another 10 producers form part of the Visitors Program at the Berlinale Co-Production Market.

For an analysis of what the companies and projects say about the current state of the Spanish film industry, please read the Spanish cinema Spotlight in Friday’s Variety print Daily. In the meantime, here’s a drill down on the 20 companies and key titles featured at Spain in Focus.

Producers Showcase

Alba Sotorra S.L., Alba Sotorra

Barcelona-based and now established as one of Spain’s leading and far-ranging international co-production practitioners,...

Greek-French filmmaker Costa Gavras, Japanese director Miike Takashi and Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof, whose latest film “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” is Oscar shortlisted, have joined the roster of speakers at International Film Festival Rotterdam for the upcoming 54th edition, running from Jan. 30 – Feb. 9.

IFFR will present two strands of conversations: Big Talks, featuring dialogues between world-renowned figures from diverse disciplines, and Tiger Talks, offering explorations of film-related themes and addressing various issues including feminism, the legacy of colonialism, and cinema’s sociopolitical role.

Additional talks will take place during the Rtm Day, IFFR’s program dedicated to Rotterdam on Jan. 31.

Furthermore, the IFFR Pro Dialogues program of industry-focused discussions will be held during the IFFR Pro Days, running between Jan. 31 – Feb. 5.

Also during the festival, IFFR will welcome further special guests to present their titles in selection, including Payal Kapadia (“All We Imagine as Light”), Jan-Willem van Ewijk (“Alpha.

Following The Film Stage’s collective top 50 films of 2024, as part of our year-end coverage, our contributors are sharing their personal top 10 lists.

I’ll be blunt: it wasn’t a good year for films, or at least for me it wasn’t. The following ten films and five honorable mentions, while fine to very good, represent a step down from what 2023 offered. Part of this is due to an industry impacted by two strikes in 2023 that cancelled or postponed many productions. Part of it is personal, in that I couldn’t see as many films as I’d like in 2024. And part of it has to do with the large amount of mediocrity I did see, of films that lacked risk and imagination. A lot of movies preferred to ape their influences rather than build off of them, and in turn coddled viewers with familiarity. By the end of...

The world premiere of Arild Østin Ommundsen and Silje Salomonsen’sNorwegian family dramaEverything Must Gowill open the35thedition of the Tromso International Film Festival (TIFF), taking place inNorway fromJanuary 13-19, 2025.

James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown will close the festival.

Everything Must Go is aboutthree siblings who move back into their childhood home following their father’s funeral.

In the competition strand, 12 features are in contention for the €5,000 Aurora prize includingBrady Corbet’s The Brutalist,Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths,Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man,and Scandar Copti’s Happy Holidays.

Tromso has introduced a special sidebar focused on...

After highlighting the 50 best films you may have missed this year and our overall top 50 films of 2024, today we put our spotlight on those that still need a home: movies we loved on the festival circuit––from Berlinale, Sundance, Cannes, TIFF, NYFF, Rotterdam, and beyond—still seeking U.S. distribution.

We hope that highlighting these titles spurs some distributor interest and a forthcoming release; we’ll be sharing any updates in this regard in on social media, so make sure to follow us. As we move into 2025, one can also track our upcoming festival coverage here.

Afternoons of Solitude (Albert Serra)

Following up his career-best work with the mesmerizing Pacifiction, Albert Serra is back just a couple years later, this time with a work of non-fiction. Afternoons of Solitude is a mesmerizing portrait of bullfighting star Andrés Roca Rey, set over just a handful of extended sequences in which we...

Firmly established as one of Europe’s biggest dedicated showcases for movies from Latin America, Spain and Portugal, Huelva Ibero-American Film Festival celebrates its 50th edition with a bang, with a high-caliber main Competition, a new showcase on Spain. Following, some highlights and trends at this year’s festival, which runs Nov. 15-23.

Paz Vega: A Director is Born

Paz Vega will accept at Huelva a Premio Luz at this year’s opening ceremony. It comes at an opportune time. Known to date as a performer – star of Adam Sandler comedy “Spanglish” and Julio Medem’s carnal physiological odyssey “Sex and Lucia” – Vega has just bowed her first feature, the heavily autobiographical “Rita,” to upbeat reviews. Major plaudits to not only the central performance of the eponymous Rita, a loveable seven year-old moppet growing up in 1984 working class Seville, but Vega’s helming. “Rita’ is shot with an exquisite taste for light,...

Despite a welcome East Side renaissance in repertory screenings, genre fests, and classical retrospectives, Los Angeles as a sprawling industry town needs a banner festival where undiscovered gems, glitzy red carpet premieres, and especially international fare can earn equal ovation. Only AFI Fest, even if scaled down from the previous decade, fits the bill.

The festival’s full-time programming team travels year-long to festivals such as the Berlinale, Cannes, and TIFF to scout the finest work, and the weighty influence of the American Film Institute ensures the glamour and the gravitas. This year, the Angelina Jolie-starrer “Maria,” the world premiere of the latest Clint Eastwood movie, “Juror #2,” and the opening night documentary tribute “Music by John Williams” are all on-brand selections. Robert Zemeckis will be in conversation with Tom Hanks on Thursday before the sold-out Friday premiere of their latest collaboration, “Here.”

Premiering in L.A. are several titles...

With Afternoons of Solitude, Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra returns to Spain for his first documentary: a bloodsoaked portrait of celebrity bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey and the procession of bulls he slays. Captured in tight framing, Serra’s camera conjures never-before-seen proximity to a frontier of bloodsport. Outside the bullring, Roca Rey floats through limousines and empty hotel rooms: a startlingly somber, almost gentle presence. Without a glimmer of exposition or polemical critique, Afternoons of Solitude builds from an innate curiosity about violence and the seemingly irrational conquests of its practitioners who launch headfirst into the brink of death, risking all for nothing. Though Serra refutes it as a “masculine” performance, bullfighting––with its traditional costuming and theatricality––reveals itself as a strange anachronism: a specter of old values and cultures haunting modern Spain.

I spoke with Serra at the Festival de Nouveau Cinéma in Montreal. We discussed the enigma of Roca Rey,...

While there’s a few more fall film festivals popping up in the next month, the major ones are behind us, which means we have a strong sense of the films to have on your radar in the coming months and even through 2025. We’ve asked our writers from across the globe to weigh in on their favorite world premieres from Locarno Film Festival, Venice Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, and BFI London Film Festival.

Our coverage will continue with a few more reviews this week, and far beyond as we provide updates on the journey of these selections, so continue to explore all of our festival coverage here. In the meantime, check out top picks from our writers below and return soon for our extensive year-end coverage.

Soham Gadre (@SohamGadre)

1. April (Dea Kulumbegashvili)

2 and 3. Youth (Homecoming and Hard Times) (Wang Bing...

The 28th Ji.hlava Intl. Documentary Film Festival, which runs Oct. 25 – Nov. 3, will offer 340 films, of which 129 are world premieres, 23 international premieres and 11 European premieres.

The program includes a retrospective of Swiss filmmaker Anne Marie Miéville’s work and a showcase of films by Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang.

The festival will be attended by U.S. director Kirsten Johnson, the creator of this year’s festival trailer, Italian director Roberto Minervini, Spanish filmmaker Albert Serra and Romanian director Andrei Ujică.

Marek Hovorka, the festival’s director, said: “The program of Ji.hlava shows the extraordinary power of documentary film. Documentary filmmakers replace the literalness of reality with playfulness and originality of thought. They show us the world as we could hardly see it ourselves – unless, like them, we would like to spend long years with a camera in those places.

“Dialogue has been important to Ji.hlava since its beginning,...

Afternoons of Solitude.Ernest Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon (1932), his book of reportage on bullfighting, was received skeptically by some critics upon its publication. When reviewing it in The New York Times, R. L. Duffs contended that the work’s long-winded spiritualism was at odds with the writer’s habitually lapidary prose. Catalan director Albert Serra is also a self-described admirer of the sport; it repels some even while it mesmerizes others with its peculiar mixture of artful pageantry and shocking gore. His new nonfiction film Afternoons of Solitude (2024) eschews the Hemingway-esque temptation to dress up in philosophical garb a spectacle that, at its core, stems as much from crude, irrational impulses as it does from the desire to touch the sublime through a proximity to violence. In Afternoons, whose title professes its affinity for Hemingway’s rendering of tauromaquia, Serra follows the Peruvian bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey, observing...

This year’s San Sebastian Film Festival Official Competition was a strong one, featuring veteran filmmakers including Albert Serra - who ultimately took the top prize Golden Shell for his documentary Afternoons Of Solitude - Mike Leigh and François Ozon. There was room for new voices, too, including that of Portuguese filmmaker Laura Carreira, whose debut feature On Falling charts a handful of days in the life of a lonely migrant warehouse picker working in Scotland. The film, which stars Joana Santos as Aurora, a woman who struggles to find connections after relocating from her homeland to Edinburgh, won the Silver Shell for best director at the festival. We caught up with Edinburgh-based Carreira in Spain to chat about expanding on ideas from her short films, including The Shift, living precariously and...

When J. Hoberman placed game 6 of the 1986 World Series on his Village Voice year-end list, we had one of the first, most convincing attempts to enshrine live sports as cinema. And while a game can carry the compressed rise and fall, and dramatis personae, of a great narrative, you can further hone in on visual grammar: a televised match is also a spectacle of live editing––close-ups and masters seamlessly stitched together, rules of offscreen space and eyeline-matching also respected.

To make a UK-centric reference: Albert Serra’s new film Afternoons of Solitude is more akin to two hours of Sky Sports than you’d expect from the guy who once made Story of My Death. Following the rules, if not the spirit, of ever-festival-fashionable observational and direct cinema, we spend most of its runtime in long takes observing Spanish bullfighting rings, our eyes focused on Andrés Roca Rey, a...

91-year-old German filmmaker Edgar Reitz, best known for the influential Heimat trilogy, has started shooting his latest film Leibniz, a portrait of leading Enlightenment thinker Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.

A German polymath and one of the founders of calculus, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was one of the most important thinkers of the late 17th and early 18th centuries.

Leibniz recounts five days in his life in the winter of 1704/05, when he is supposed to sit for a portrait painter at Herrenhausen Palace. When the session fails, a young female painter from the Netherlands takes over. She sets herself the task of capturing...

La controvertida película sobre el mundo de la tauromaquia se llevó el máximo galardón en una gala que se cerró con el estreno europeo de ‘We Live in Time’. © Ssiff

La 72 edición del Festival de San Sebastián, celebrada entre el 20 y el 28 de septiembre, ha concluido este sábado con la ceremonia de entrega de premios, celebrada en el Auditorio Kursaal, en la que la película Tardes de soledad, el documental de Albert Serra que sigue la vida del torero Andrés Roca Rey durante un día de corrida, desde que se viste de luces hasta que se desviste, ha obtenido la Concha de Oro, el máximo galardón del festival.

Un galardón no exento de polémicas – ya Pacma, incluso antes de que se proyectara la película, pidió su retirada del festival – que fue entregado por la presidenta del jurado, Jaione Camborda, quien destacó su «poder artístico» y señalando, en nombre del jurado,...

Francis Ford Coppola’s Cannes world premiere Megalopolis arrived in the North American charts in sixth place on an estimated $4m in the latest sorry episode in the film’s embattled history.

The sci-fi starring Adam Driver and Giancarlo Esposito as two driven men fighting for the soul of a city opened in 1,854 locations and earned $1.8m on Friday, $1.3m on Saturday, and $915,000 on Sunday. Pre-weekend estimates put the opening at $5-7m.

Lionsgate is distributing the film for a fee so the launch is not a hefty financial misfire for the studio. However it does mark the latest in...

Francis Ford Coppola’s Cannes world premiere Megalopolis arrived in the North American charts in sixth place on an estimated $4m in the latest sorry episode in the film’s embattled history.

The sci-fi starring Adam Driver and Giancarlo Esposito as two driven men fighting for the soul of a city opened in 1,854 locations and earned $1.8m on Friday, $1.3m on Saturday, and $915,000 on Sunday. Pre-weekend estimated put the opening at $5-7m.

While not a financial misfire in and of itself for Lionsgate, who is distributing the film for a fee, it does mark another in what has become...

Albert Serra with his Golden Shell for Afternoons Of Solitude Photo: Courtesy of San Sebastian Film Festival/Alex Abril Albert Serra's bullfighting documentary Afternoons Of Solitude won the Golden Shell as San Sebastian Film Festival's 72nd edition drew to a close last night.

The film considers the life of matador Andrés Roca Rey and Serra received the award from last year’s Golden Shell winner, Spanish filmmaker Jaione Camborda. The jury also included directors Ulrich Seidl, Christos Nikou and Fran Kranz, producer Carole Scotta and journalist Leila Guerriero.

The Silver Shell directing honours were shared ex-aequo by Edinburgh-based Portuguese filmmaker Laura Carreira for On Falling, a carefully crafted character study of a Portuguese migrant working as a warehouse picker and Spaniard Pedro Martín Calero, also making his debut, with ambitious female-centric horror film The Wailing.

Laura Carreira receives her Silver Shell from Carole Scotta for On Falling Photo: Courtesy of...

The poetic title, Afternoons of Solitude (Tardes de Soledad), might evoke tranquility and relaxation, maybe a few lazy hours in a hammock with a book. But don’t be deceived. Albert Serra’s transfixing portrait of 27-year-old Peruvian bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey, and of the hotly contentious Spanish tradition in which he has emerged as a star, never downplays the visceral brutality of what’s essentially blood sport as performance art. Anyone with a low threshold for cruelty to animals will find this a harrowing watch, but for those with the stomach for it, the doc is a unique study of discipline, bravado, laser focus and showmanship.

Serra, known for stripped-down slow-cinema narratives that can be both seductive and distancing, had something of an international breakthrough with 2022’s Pacifiction. This nonfiction detour evinces many qualities familiar from his dramatic features, among them the atmospheric, quasi-dream state; the long takes, usually...

Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl took home the Special Jury Prize at the 2024 San Sebastián Film Festival, held in Spain’s Basque Country from Sept. 20 through 28.

“For the high quality of its acting, packed with truth and nuances, which with great subtlety and restraint, brings us closer to the feelings of a group of people who must confront a disappearing profession, a world that is coming to an end,” the jury’s verdict read, per the fete’s press release.

About a veteran Las Vegas showgirl who must switch up her life’s routine following the unexpected closure of her three-decade-long show, the drama features a star-studded cast in Pamela Anderson, Kiernan Shipka, Brenda Song, Billie Lourd, Dave Bautista and Jamie Lee Curtis. As Deadline exclusively reported yesterday, The Last Showgirl was just acquired by Roadside Attractions for its North American release.

The Golden Shell for Best Film was...

Spanish director Albert Serra’s bullfighting documentary Afternoons Of Solitude has won the Golden Shell for best film at the closing ceremony of the 72nd edition of the Spanish festival tonight (Saturday September 28).

The special jury prize was awarded to Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl which stars Pamela Anderson as a Vegas showgirl facing the end of her career.

’Afternoons Of Solitude’ review

The official competition jury, presided over by Spanish filmmaker Jaione Camborda – who was last year’s Golden Shell winner for The Rye Horn, also awarded top prizes to new filmmakers. The Silver Shell for best director...

The 72nd San Sebastian Film Festival’s Golden Shell for best film has gone to Albert Serra’s Afternoons of Solitude, a documentary on bullfighting, edging out strong competition from narrative features by Joshua Oppenheimer, Edward Berger and Mike Leigh.

The Spanish director’s film focuses on Peruvian-Spanish bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey. While noting that the doc’s graphic cruelty makes it a harrowing watch, The Hollywood Reporter‘s chief film critic David Rooney in his review called it “transfixing … a unique study of discipline, bravado, laser-focus and showmanship.” It beat out Leigh’s Hard Truths and Berger’s Conclave, as well as Oppenheimer’s dystopian musical The End.

Elsewhere, Pamela Anderson and the cast of Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl took home the Special Jury Prize for best ensemble cast. THR‘s review of the film said: “Even if The Last Showgirl feels slender overall, more consistently attentive...

Sometimes, in a closely contested festival competition, it pays to be the one thing that isn’t like the others. A starkly powerful, observational study of contemporary bullfighting, Spanish auteur Albert Serra’s “Afternoons of Solitude” was the only documentary in the main competition at this year’s San Sebastian Film Festival — and this evening won the Golden Shell for best film of the festival, beating some big-name narrative competition.

The award was presented by last year’s Golden Shell winner, Spanish filmmaker Jaione Camborda, heading a jury that also included directors Ulrich Seidl, Christos Nikou and Fran Kranz, producer Carole Scotta and Argentine journalist Leila Guerriero.

Centred on star Peruvian matador Andrés Rey Roca, “Afternoons of Solitude” is candid in its depiction of the violence of the sport, and has already proven controversial on home turf, with Spain’s animal-rights party Pacma calling for the film to be withdrawn from the festival.

Albert Serra’s “Afternoons of Solitude” begins not taking the bull by the horns, but looking it in the eye. It opens on a blunt close-up of a magnificent bovine specimen staring straight to camera, its gaze somehow confrontational, even as its pupils are nearly lost in the glossy obsidian monument of its head. The beast presumably doesn’t know it’s about to die, but seems angrily resigned to its fate anyway — or more likely we feel angry on its behalf, and project that back onto this regal image. In the course of the next two hours, Serra’s extraordinary documentary about the ritual grandeur and violent indignity of Spanish bullfighting will never again observe its animal victims quite so intimately, but neither do we forget the shot: Even as the film’s focus shifts to the bull’s human conqueror, star Peruvian torero Andrés Roca Rey, it’s...

San Sebastian — With its awards ceremony Saturday night, the San Sebastian Festival’s 72nd edition is heading into its final straits. Following, 10 takeaways from what looks like its biggest edition ever in star wattage, the caliber of Spanish filmmaking and the number of deals reported by Variety, set in the context of vertiginous change in international independent film and TV landscape.

San Sebastian 2024: The Stars Align

Johnny Depp visited kids in a San Sebastian hospital dressed as Jack Sparrow; Javier Bardem teared up remembering his mother, the exemplary Pilar Bardem; Pedro Almodóvar remembered back 44 years to his first San Sebastian, performing at disco Ku and ending up on the beach at 8 in the morning. Cate Blanchett, accepting her Donostia Award, praised the “uncertainty which drives me.”

Never before have so many stars descended on San Sebastian. Why? “I think two factors are at play,” San Sebastian Film Festival director José Luis Rebordinos told Variety.

Pedro Almodóvar reflected on his long career and the political nature of his films at the San Sebastian International Film Festival (Siff) where he is in town to receive the festival’s honorary Donostia Award.

Almodóvar attended a packed press conference today (September 26) with cast including Tilda Swinton from his first English-language feature: The Room Next Door, which earlier this month won the Golden Lion at Venice.

Almodóvar arrived in San Sebastian yesterday (September 25), the day of his 75th birthday.

“The last 24 hours have been an emotional whirlwind, even more so than I expected,” said the director. “I have been on the verge of tears,...

Zdf Studios’ Off the Fence, the company behind Oscar-winning doc My Octopus Teacher, has acquired worldwide rights excluding North America and Latin America to rainforest documentary We Are Guardians.

We Are Guardians is executive produced by Leonardo DiCaprio’s Appian Way Productions and produced by Highly Flammable, co-founded last year by Oscar winner Fisher Stevens whose credits include Beckham, The Cove and Tiger King.

The documentary centres on Indigenous forest guardians in the Amazon Rainforest fighting to protect their ancestral lands from invasions and deforestation.

It is the feature debut of directors Edivan Guajajara, co-founder of Mídia Indígena, the leading...

Daniel Hendler’s A Loose End, Sarah Miro Fischer’s Blue Marks, and Francisco Lezama’s The Two Landscapes have taken the main prizes in the 72nd San Sebastian International Film Festival (Ssiff) industry programme.

The awards were announced at an event on September 25.

A Loose End was presented as a project at the Europe-Latin America Co-Production Forum in 2023 and was offered this year to buyers and potential partners in its near-completion stage.

The film is a co-production between Uruguay’s Cordon Films and Argentina’s Wanka Cine. It follows a low-ranking police officer who arrives at the border between...

As exciting as it can be to see some of the most-anticipated films of the year at their festival debuts, it’s perhaps even a more enticing proposition to seek out the films that one may not have a chance to for quite some time. With the 62nd New York Film Festival kicking off this Friday, September 27 at Film at Lincoln Center, we’ve highlighted the must-see selections still seeking U.S. distribution at the time of publishing. For more coverage, follow here and subscribe to our daily newsletter.

Afternoons of Solitude (Albert Serra)

Following up his career-best work with the mesmerizing Pacifiction, Albert Serra is back just a couple years later, this time with a work of non-fiction. Afternoons of Solitude is a mesmerizing portrait of bullfighting star Andrés Roca Rey, set over just a handful of extended sequences in which we bear witness to the primal connection made between man and animal.

In July, José Luis Rebordinos, director of the San Sebastián Film Festival, highlighted the growing prominence of documentaries at this year’s event. Among the notable examples he cited were Albert Serra’s “Afternoons of Solitude,” and the New Directors opener “La guitarra flamenca de Yerai Cortés,” the directorial debut of Antón Álvarez, better known to date as singer-songwriter C. Tangana.

“Genre auteur cinema has been around for some time, but there’s ever more of it, and non-fiction cinema is increasingly normal,” Rebordinos observed. These selections highlight Spain’s expanding presence in the documentary realm. Basque cinema is not lagging behind.

A prime example is “Los Williams,” which arrives at the festival bolstered by the celebrity of its subjects, soccer superstar siblings Iñaki and Nico Williams. Amaia Remírez, its producer at Kanaki Films, shared with Variety that director Raúl de la Fuente drew his inspiration from seeing the profound...

Films Boutique has picked up international rights to Albert Serra’s documentary “Afternoons of Solitude” (Tardes de Soledad) ahead of its world premiere in the competition section of the San Sebastian Film Festival.

The film marks the third collaboration between Serra and Berlin-based Films Boutique after “Liberté,” winner of the Special Jury Prize in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard in 2019, and “Pacifiction,” which premiered in Cannes competition in 2022 and went on to earn nine nominations and two wins at France’s Cesar.

Further awards for “Pacifiction” included best director and cinematography at France’s Lumiere Awards, as well as 11 nominations at the Gaudi awards with wins for cinematography, production design and non-Catalan language film. The film also received a best film nod from the Guardian and was also elected best film of the year by the Cahiers du Cinéma.

“Afternoons of Solitude” is a portrait of bullfighting star Andrés Roca Rey,...

San Sebastian — Is this the San Sebastián Catalan Film Festival? Always boasting a sterling presence at San Sebastián, Catalonia has a massive 27 titles this year, counting five projects in doc forum Lau Haizetara and including four of the five Spanish movies in main Competition and 10 in Made in Spain. Following a break-down of major section titles:

Main Competition

“Afternoons of Solitude,” (Andergraun Films, Ideale Audience, Lacima Producciones)

Albert Serra’s not at all obvious follow-up to Cannes competition player “Pacifiction,” a portrait of star bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey at work. The results remain to be seen. Serra has shot the disc feature “with respect and innocence, without prejudice nor provocation,” he tells Spain’s ABC Cultural.

“Glimmers,” (Inicia Films, Mod Producciones, Misent Producciones)

The latest from Pilar Palomero. A top-notch Spanish cast led by Patricia López Arnaíz and Antonio de la Torre drive the tale of a woman asked by...

This year’s San Sebastian International Film Festival will feature the most eye-catching list of international superstars it has ever hosted, including A-list actors such as Cate Blanchett and Javier Bardem – who will both receive Donostia career achievement awards, Andrew Garfield, Pamela Anderson, Tilda Swinton and Lupita Nyong’o and filmmakers like local legend Pedro Almodovar – another Donostia award recipient, Adam Elliot, Gia Coppola, Mike Leigh and Walter Salles.

Other international actors who have confirmed they will attend this year’s festival include Monica Bellucci, Jamie Campbell Bower, Johnny Depp, Isabelle Huppert, Noémie Merlant, Ángela Molina, Franco Nero, Charlotte Rampling and Will Sharpe, among others.

Normally, many directors attend San Sebastian with their latest films, but the number of titles from consecrated directors at this year’s festival has increased noticeably. Filmmakers bringing their latest to this year’s festival include Jacques Audiard, Sean Baker, Edward Berger, Leos Carax, Costa-Gavras, Audrey Diwan,...