San Sebastián Film Festival: Who is competing for this year's Golden Shell?

Held in the seaside village of Donostia-San Sebastián in the Basque Country, the San Sebastián International Film Festival is the world's most important Spanish-language film festival. 

It’s a wonderfully intimate A-list festival, which neatly wraps up the vibrant-but-hectic fall festival season after Venice and Toronto.

San Sebastián awards the Golden Shell top prize for Best Film, as well as the Silver Shells and the Sebastiane Award, delivered to a film that best reflects the values and realities of the LGBTQ+ community.

Javier Bardem, the winner of a San Sebastián 2023 Donostia Award for career achievement, was plastered all over the posters of this year's 71st edition and has sadly put back his on-stage acceptance of the distinction until the 2024 edition due to the “limits imposed under the strike called by the US Actors Union (SAG-AFTRA)."

It deprives this year’s festival of its biggest on-stage major star moment this year.

The fest will, however, enjoy an impressive 71-film line-up, as well as a jury helmed by celebrated French director Claire Denis, alongside Christian Petzold, Fan Bingbing, Cristina Gallego, Brigitte Lacombe, Vicky Luengo, and Robert Lantos.

Festivities opens with Hayao Miyazaki’s animated film The Boy and the Heron, which just had its opening night in Toronto at TIFF and will be heading to Lyon’s Lumière Film Festival in October. Producers Studio Ghibli have described the film as “a grand fantasy” loosely inspired by Japanese author Genzaburo Yoshino’s 1937 novel 'How Do You Live?', a coming-of-age story about the emotional and philosophical development of a young boy after the death of his father.

Ghibli took the unprecedented step of doing no marketing for the film, releasing no trailers and no