The San Sebastian Film Festival has said it will host a day of action in support of Argentinian cinema during this year’s 72nd edition, which runs September 20-28.
The Spanish festival has teamed with the Argentine Academy of Cinematography Arts and Sciences and producer Gabriel Hochbaum along with Argentinian production companies, filmmakers, and journalists to mount the event.
The solidarity day will take place on September 24, coinciding with the Official Selection premiere of Argentine filmmaker Diego Lerman’s film El hombre que amaba los platos voladores. The festival will also host a cocktail event with the Argentine delegation, who will gather on the Kursaal Auditorium stairs before the screening of Traslados. The non-fiction film directed by Nicolás Gil Lavedra, which will be released in Argentina tomorrow, will have its international premiere in San Sebastian and focuses on the so-called death flights, one of the popular execution techniques used by Argentina’s last military dictatorship. The screening will be accompanied by an introduction and talk by the film team, led by the director and producer Zoe Hochbaum.
This year’s San Sebastian Festival will screen 16 films produced totally or partially in Argentina across the Official Selection, New Directors, Horizontes Latinos, Zabaltegi-Tabakalera, and Movies for Kids sections. The festival’s industry section will also feature six Argentine projects selected for the Europe-Latin American Co-Production Forum, two works in progress in WIP Latam, and one Ikusmira Berriak Project with the participation of an Argentine production company.
Argentina’s film industry has been in freefall since March when the government of Javier Milei, the country’s far-right leader, pushed through highly controversial plans to defund all state funding to the National Institute of Cinema and Audiovisual Arts (INCAA), the country’s national film body.
In an official public notice published Tuesday, Milei’s Human Capital Ministry said it discovered a $4 million deficit in INCAA’s budget partly funded by the Treasury and, as a result, would move to cut costs by suspending all funding to the institute.