Spain and Argentina open the official competition at the San Sebastian Film Festival

The movie Spanish Wild Sunflowersabout the loving apprenticeship of a young mother, and the Argentina The Substitute, set in a school on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, opened this Saturday the competition for the Golden Shell for the best film of the San Sebastian Film Festival.

One day after its inauguration, the event in the city in the north of Spain hosted the first screenings of the films that will compete for the main prizes, which will be awarded at the closing gala next Saturday.

The honor of starting the competition went to Girasoles Salvajes, by Catalan director Jaime Rosales, with the Julia’s story, a young mother of two children who enters into successive relationships with several menwhile learning which complements it best.

“There is talk of apprenticeship in a profession, but there is also an apprenticeship in love,” Rosales explained at a press conference, noting that as in “all other apprenticeships, we try people who are different” and, if “something has gone wrong ” in one, “we will look for another type of person”.

The movie touches gender violence, but avoiding making Julia a victimbecause the character is “someone very strong, very resistant to difficulties”, who with “each blow (…) is immediately looking for a new solution”, says Rosales.

Julia belongs to a group of “very young girls, who live in a very patriarchal system, who have very toxic masculinities around them (…) and who navigate those very complicated seas as best they can,” explained the actress who plays her, Anna Castillo, winner of a Goya for “El olivo”.

Drama in the suburbs of Buenos Aires

In the afternoon, in the official section, the Argentine El suplente, by Diego Lerman, was presented, about Lucio, a writer who replaces his sick father as teacher of a class in a school in a deprived area of the suburbs of Buenos Aires, where the drug trafficking sink your teeth.

With participation of local teenagers and real teachersthe film shows “education as a space of social containment, especially in very precarious neighborhoods where drug trafficking is penetrating,” said Argentine actor Juan Minujín, who plays Lucio.

“I find the line between documentary and fiction very interesting and Diego’s film manages to establish it,” said Chilean Alfredo Castro, who plays Lucio’s father.

The substitute is one of the three Latin American feature films who will compete this year for the gold shell. The other two are Pornomelancolía, by Argentine Manuel Abramovich, and Los reyes del mundo, by Colombian Laura Mora.

Beyond the official competition, San Sebastian was the scene this Saturday of the presentation of the documentary about Joaquin Sabina of the director Fernando León de Aranoa, who followed the artist for 13 years.

“It is not a documentary to the greater glory of an artist, but rather It’s a slice of a singer’s lifeSabina, 73, said at a press conference about Feeling a lot.

Mixing images of Sabina in different facets with in-depth interviews, the film is a rintimate portrait that explores the creative process, fears and desires of the singer from Calle Melancolía and Along the Boulevard of Broken Dreams.

In the section dedicated to Latin American cinema, Horizontes, this Saturday the festival screened 1976, Chilean director Manuela Martelli’s debut feature, about the early years of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile told from the point of view of an anonymous woman.

It also entered the race for the award for best Latin American film Two Seasons, the debut in fiction feature film by Mexican Juan Pablo González, which tells the story of a woman looking to save the tequila factory she inherited.

In the section Latin Horizons compete this year 12 tapes of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador and Mexico.