New feature films from Alice Winocour, Arnaud Desplechin, Kentaro Hirase and Yutaro Seki, Agnieszka Holland and Milagros Mumenthaler will compete in the San Sebastian Film Festival official selection.
Winocour, who won the special jury prize at San Sebastián with Proxima in 2019, will return to the competition with her fifth film, Couture, a French American co-production starring Angelina Jolie and Louis Garrel set in the fashion world.
Frenchman Desplechin will participate for the first time in competition with Two Pianos, in which a virtuoso pianist returns to his hometown of Lyon to experience a story of impossible love. Among the cast members are François Civil, Nadia Tereszkiewicz, Charlotte Rampling and Hippolyte Girardot.
The duo made up of Hirase and Seki, who co-directed 2022’s Roleless with Masahiko Sato, will premiere their second feature film, the Japanese production Sai. Actor Teruyuki Kagawa comes back to star in the dark tale in which a mysterious man tragically enters the lives of a number of people, appearing under different identities.
Elsewhere, Holland’s new film, a Franz Kafka biopic titled Franz, will premiere as the director returns to San Sebastian. Argentine filmmaker Milagros Mumenthaler will debut in competition with her third film, The Currents, a Swiss-Argentine co-production starring Isabel Aimé González Sola in the role of a woman confronting a past she thought she had left behind.
These titles join the four previously announced Spanish productions that will also compete at the Spanish festival: Maspalomas, by Jose Mari Goenaga and Aitor Arregi; Good Valley Stories, by José Luis Guerin; Los Tigres, by Alberto Rodríguez, and Sundays, by Alauda Ruiz de Azúa. The rest of the feature films included in the competition will be announced in the coming weeks.
The 73rd edition of the San Sebastian International Film Festival runs Sept. 19-27.