Over the last year or so, Spain has burst onto the world stage, scoring five Cannes main competition berths — more than any other country in the world outside France — with joint best director winner “La Bola Negra” now prominent in awards season conversations. Spain’s San Sebastián Film Festival looks set to capture this momentum and also play a key role in Spain’s global breakout. I’ve been programming cinema since I was 28.
Spanish cinema has never been so powerful, with so many important international films,” says San Sebastían festival director José Luis Rebordinos. One reason, Rebordinos says, is the work of Spain’s broadcasters and streamers. This year’s San Sebastián is a case in point.
Of pay TV/SVOD services, Movistar Plus, the biggest Spanish operator, has three titles in major sections at San Sebastián: “La Bola Negra,” a Neflix U.S. pickup, “El Castillo” and “5 Minutes More,” and Netflix Spain has one: “After Society.” A Movistar Plus Original like previous Cannes competition contenders “Sirāt” and “The Beloved,” “La Bola Negra” weaves the travails and legacy of Spain’s gay experience in 1932, Spanish Civil War-torn 1937 and 2017, picking up on four pages in an unfinished novel by revered poet-playwright Federico García Lorca. Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi direct. Its budget has been reported as anywhere between €14 million ($16 million) and €18 million ($20 million), which can only be achieved in Europe via a daring and bullish backing by a major player.
Those ambitions are now scaling globally. Netflix, having picked up the U.S. and Canada at Cannes, has set a 47-day U.S. window between theatrical and streaming for “La Bola Negra,” from Oct. 16 to Dec. 1, the longest for any movie in the streaming giant’s history. Film Festival will be a further test of the film’s audience appeal.
It will make a lot of noise in San Sebastián and I’m convinced it will mark a milestone in Spanish cinema, a great success for Movistar Plus and and Los Javis, taking them to another dimension,” predicts García Ropero. One large question at this year’s San Sebastián fest is whether six-part Movistar Plus series “El Castillo,” co-created by Isabel Peña, Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s career-long co-scribe, can now take Peña’s career to the next level. It‘s Peña‘’’s first solo outing.
Building good word-of-mouth in the run-up to San Sebastián, “El Castillo” weighs in as an authentically tawdry chronicle told from a three viewpoints: sex worker Claudia, a single mother from Colombia, voracious prostitution kingpin Manuel and young inspector Liesa, part of a police special unit determined to bring Manuel down. Feature “5 More Minutes” also looks like a step-up for writer-actor Berto Romero. A top Spanish standup, he has risen in the Movistar Plus ranks from star turns on late-night shows to a first fiction series, shepherding comedy “Look What You’ve Done,” and then “The Other Side,” a comedic-horror-thriller.
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