After the 73rd San Sebastian Film Festival
- Zekican Sarısoy
- Oct 10
- 10 min read
First of all, you were beautiful, San Sebastian. An incredible oasis for Spanish cinema, as well as for Latin American and Asian cinema. Within the impossibility of ‘white’ European cinema, you are a rare chance that makes room for diversity. You offer the potential to encounter surprises-whether one digs deeper or not. It’s a beautiful festival I left with too much joy. A week filled with wonderful friends and countless shared impressions. Until our paths cross again, I hope we’ll, I’ve listed the films that stayed with me from the 73rd edition of the festival, held between September 19–27, 2025. And I hope you’ll get the chance to see these beautiful works somewhere.
Editor: Tuba Büdüş
The Fence (Claire Denis, France, 2025)
#ClaireDenis crafts an incredibly skillful story within a very confined space. It’s an adaptation of Bernard-Marie Koltès’ "Black Battles With Dogs." I loved the tension and dialogue between #MattDillon and #IsaachdeBankolé. However, I can not say the same for #TomBlyth. Sorry not sorry.
The film focuses on a British-owned construction site in Africa where the supervisor (Matt Dillon) must deal with the death of one of his workers and a local villager (Isaach De Bankolé) who arrives demanding answers.
What struck me most, I can say, perhaps the least convincing aspect within the film’s narrative, was its attempt to in some way understand colonial white people. I’m not sure we should really be trying to understand them beyond detailing or creating a background. Still, this is a gem from the hands of a masterful female director. Her visual choices work, and they provoke a great deal of thought.
The Love That Remains (Hlynur Pálmason, Iceland/Denmark, 2025)
#HlynurPálmason is truly an exciting line for our cinema! He excites me incredibly all the time. At times-and I was sooo tired- I laugh lot. I really loved his previous film "Godland". I watched this one with exactly that same excitement.
He did not disappoint my expectations. I especially liked was how he portrayed a female character so accurately and with such depth. Loved it! Sometimes he makes use of silence or emptiness but without feeling the need to fill it. Isn’t that the case with life itself, right? We don’t always do everything so that it’s meaningful or full. Sometimes it’s like staring at a blank wall. Or like sleeping and waking up. This effortlessness really works. The film also has stunning cinematography. Oh yes. I felt as though I was watching a postcard sometimes.
In portraying the end of a marriage, the film shows some moments of poignancy and humour over expressions of anger.
It's one criticism about the film, trying to add too much humor, it occasionally slips into a kind of “dad joke” and spreading everywhere. Please watch this film in the cinema.
Sleepless City (Guillermo García López, Spain/France, 2025)
The film has an incredible opening scene. Its approach to the characters, the way it works with them, is truly impressive. Amidst all the devastation we see, this film carries joy. It carries hope. It has a particularly subtle language.
There’s a kind of compassion toward the people and communities it approaches that we can really feel. Especially the way it portrays everyday life, daily details, dialogues, and conflicts between people is so masterful!
This film should be shown to all male directors who don’t know how to approach women or closed communities. When I finished the film, I genuinely wanted to congratulate the director. I left with such joy. Thank you so much director #GuillermoGaloe. The cinematographer Rui Poças is mesmerizing.
Toni, a 15-year-old Roma boy, lives in the largest illegal slum in Europe, on the outskirts of Madrid. Proud to belong to his family of scrap dealers, he follows his grandfather everywhere. But when demolition companies start closing in on their land, the family is divided: while some decide to move to the city, his grandfather refuses to abandon their land.
The Imminent Age (Clara Serrano Llorens/Gerard Simó Gimeno, Spain, 2024)
This story manages to create vast worlds out of a tiny universe. Does it have flaws? Of course. But I’d say it doesn’t matter if we overlook them. Because it opens up so many themes with remarkable precision like aging, growing up without parents, life and death, loving and being loved, discovering oneself.
It doesn’t make grand statements or comments. It takes just as much risk as a child would while growing up. It gives just as much space as a child would be able to discover. And yet, it quietly shows us how painful it is to grow up without living through childhood. The film has details I truly won’t forget. It’s a carefully crafted script. My thanks to the directors. It was screened in the festival’s "Made in Spain" section.
Bruno's (18) life is increasingly limited by the growing dependence of his grandmother Nati (86). The young boy juggles between providing her increasingly more intensive care needs, working and spending time with his friends. When he receives a phone call from a public nursing home offering his grandmother a place, Bruno will try to keep the balance in order not to lose the only family he has ever known.
The Son and the Sea (Stroma Cairns, UK, 2025)
Director #StromaCairns’ debut feature film The Son and the Sea (2025) had its world premiere in Toronto and was later screened in the New Directors section of the 73rd San Sebastián Film Festival on September 21.
Carrying all the excitement of a first film, this road story also bears the sincerity of Cairns’ sensitivity when approaching human nature. While tackling male culture, male companionship, or camaraderie, the film goes beyond simply reproducing masculinity and instead captures, from a strikingly precise angle, the possibility of another kind of “masculinity.”
Read the full article via link.
Cuerpo Celeste (Nayra Ilic, Chile/Italy, 2025)
I loved it. A wonderful coming-of-age story. The film has very small details, and these details open up beautiful cracks between time and space. In a way, it gives the viewer the task of filling them in. The film explores the potential of a young woman and a mother to live together, while at the same time moving through the layers of the mourning process both experience after a loss.
While it seems to draw on familiar conflict dynamics, it leaves one leg of the conflict outside. In other words, instead of placing the responsibility for problems, growth, and situations we cannot resolve entirely on ourselves, it looks at where the outside world stands in all this. My main criticism of the film, I think, is that in trying to create conflict, it sometimes ends up creating characters who lose too much of their capacity for empathy. Of course, that’s a choice too, but it creates a sense of uncertainty because it stands in direct contrast to what the film offers and makes us believe in.
Celeste is only 15 years old when her life changes unexpectedly. Not only is the young girl faced with painful mourning, but she also has to cope with a family in crisis.
Belén (Dolores Fonzi, Argentina, 2025)
Especially loved Belén for its approach to the women’s movement. The film reminds us of the power of collective struggle through individual stories. With its camera, Belén makes visible the structures that restrict women’s lives while at the same time amplifying their forms of solidarity. From this perspective, the film strongly intersects with the dynamics of the women’s movement in Turkey. Women in Turkey, too, struggle to exist in public space and to create their own voice in the face of similar pressures. Thus, this story is not only about Argentina but also touches on practices of resistance on a global scale. What struck me most and most is the film’s nuanced gaze, which highlights women’s resilience without romanticizing their anger, and allows us to hear women’s voices not as an echo but as something new.
Are there technical shortcomings in the film? Of course they had. But I can skip them. We should be able to. Where struggle reaches, we must dare to see the possibilities it can open. What we need is not words that block them, but a perspective that can mend.
Bugonia (Yorgos Lanthimos, UK, 2025)
I loved it. I think there’s an incredible energy between Yorgos and Emma, and likewise with Jesse. From start to finish, the film gave me the feeling that everyone knew and understood everything perfectly, that nothing was hidden, and that there was even some improvisation at times. In short, everyone fully owned what they were doing and was genuinely invested in creating something together.
It’s actually such a simple, small story. In terms of production, it sits somewhere between Poor Things and Kinds of Kindness. But in the end, what comes out really works-because it has something to say, and while telling its story, it somehow makes us believe in all its absurdity. No matter how ridiculous everything that happens may be, it still finds its own path.
A lovely gift for all the whiny men who complain about everything in their rooms, mumbling as if the world has collapsed and only they’re left beneath the ruins. I hope you get the message dear friends, even just a little. This film is a small reflection of men’s tendency to project all their inadequacies, failures, and frustrations-along with every reason and excuse-onto women or some imagined “other.” The responsibility for everything you’ve failed to become doesn’t lie outside of you, my dear. In a world that declares you supremely powerful the moment your umbilical birth cord is cut, maybe-just maybe- please stop complaining about everything.
Two obsessive beekeepers kidnap the CEO of a pharmaceutical company. They believe he’s an alien.
Strange River (Jaume Claret Muxart, Spain/Germany, 2025)
A beautiful coming-of-age story. It also takes a close look at everyone else who grows alongside the child, right where he stands. So where are they in this story? Family, friends, other communities-I mean do our dreams really progress at the same pace as we do? This was the question that lingered with me after the film ended. Still alive by the way. Quite thought-provoking.
The film reminds me of the impossibility of holding on to time. I mean, as it runs, are we truly running with all our strength as well? Cinematography-thank you, Pablo Paloma. The silence flowing across the film’s surface in fact evokes a very noisy historical layer underneath. While Muxart’s camera follows the everyday along the riverbank, it simultaneously points to the losses and forgotten ones imprinted in the images. In this sense, the film makes visible the fragile balance between nature and humanity through a gesture that is both simple and profound.
For me, the watching experience opened up to both an archival perspective and a bodily sensibility. All this elevates the film beyond being a mere “observation,” carrying it into a broader field of memory. And I believe this is tremendously valuable for the future of new queer cinema.
Young Dídac travels by bicycle along the course of the Danube with his family during a summer. But when he meets the mysterious Alexander, who appears and disappears in the river’s waters, times, something in him begins to change.
A Free Man (Laura Hojman, Spain, 2025)
A Free Man reminded me once again of how poetry, the spoken word, and resistance can intertwine. Laura Hojman, I feel so lucky to have met you and to know you. The narrative the director constructs is not just a portrait; it is also like a doorway opening onto the social and political climate of an era. While centering a figure who resisted history through poetry, it also makes visible his loneliness, his fractures, and his inner conflicts. The rhythm of the film almost completely overlaps with the rhythm of writing and speech; that’s why, while watching, I felt not so much like I was seeing a documentary but rather listening to a long poem.
The connection forged with archival footage shows that the past is not only documented but also reinterpreted. A new breath into the archive. For me, what was especially important was how the film presented political memory not merely as a historical event, but as a mood that seeps into the present.
Hojman reminds us that memory is always contemporary and constantly reshaping us. For example, the fact that the poet is scarcely known even in his own country, or that his struggle with HIV is somewhat pushed into the background, stood out to me. But we must not forget that at every fracture of memory, a new breath, a new leap, emerges. Would I have liked to see that more? Absolutely yes but as I said, the story carries a high potential for dispersion.
The contrast between the stillness of the visual language and the sharpness of the words makes the film undeniably powerful. Throughout the watching experience, I thought about how art can create a space for both personal and collective freedom. All of this transforms the film into not merely a biography, but also a struggle of remembrance and resistance. Thank you, dear Agustín Gómez Arcos, for everything you have left us. How immense your struggle is!
Die My Love (Lynne Ramsay, US/UK, 2025)
This film made me think deeply about how the pain carried by the body can be made visible. Ramsay’s camera captures the violence and conflict within the character’s inner world down to the smallest gestures. My God! Borderline motherhood, a newborn baby, joy, pain, grief, the struggle to exist and this film mixes them all together in the same vessel. Absolutely one of the best films of the year. I embrace it with all its flaws and perfections alike.
Throughout the film, we witness not only a woman’s story but also the suffocating atmosphere created by social pressures. What struck me the most was that feeling of alienation in the relationship with nature; as if the environment itself amplified the character’s loneliness. Every step she took turned into a suffocating ritual.
The film creates an intense emotional space without ever slipping into melodrama — though it easily could have. The moments of silence, for instance, carry the inner scream outward more heavily than any words could. At times, I felt the urge to scream along with Jennifer Lawrence. While watching, I kept thinking about how being a “mother,” a “wife,” and a “woman” each imposes its own distinct burden. Ramsay is a director who can make you feel everything without explaining anything. I think that’s at the heart of the immense affection I feel for her. The moment I enter her cinema, my experience of watching becomes something deeply personal, something else entirely. And it still lives with me.
The film, in a way, documents both a physical and a spiritual collapse and it never allows this to be experienced simply as an ending or a beginning. Long live dear Lynne Ramsay.
Please pay attention to these films: Elder Son, Shape of Momo, The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo, If We Don’t Burn, How Do We Light Up the Night, and Un mundo para mí.
This review was first published on October 10, 2025, at filmhafizasi.com as Turkish.
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