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’m 64. 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.
“Above all, what we’re trying to do is to bet on the best talent, not on genres or formats but creators with their own voices,” says Movistar Plus director of contents Juan Andrés García Ropero.
“La Bola Negra” is also a reflection of the extraordinary ambitions of both Movistar Plus and Los Javis — as Calvo and Ambrossi are known in Spain. 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. “La Bola Negra” is already being talked up by awards pundits as a frontrunner to score an international feature nomination, plus possible recognition in other Oscar categories.
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.
“La Bola Negra’s” screening at San Sebastián, theatrical bow in Spain via Elástica on Sept. 25 and its North American premiere at the Toronto Intl. Film Festival will be a further test of the film’s audience appeal.
“Given its production standards, how it’s shot and told, ‘La Bola Negra’ becomes a great event. 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.
“El Castillo” follows Spain’s sex trade as it transforms from small road-side establishments to macro-brothels and nationwide organized crime. 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.
“Again, I think ‘El Castillo’ will make a lot noise and prove a conversation-driver at San Sebastián,” says García Ropero.
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.
In comedic sci-fi thriller “5 More Minutes” an on-the-rocks couple are caught in time loop at a rural getaway.
“It’s not easy to blend comedy and fantasy,” says García Ropero. “Berto likes this mix of different genres and ‘5 More Minutes’ is a magnificent example.”
“Using the conventions of genre to subvert them, reshape them, and lead audiences to places other than where they expect to go is, to me, a fascinating way of telling stories,” adds Berto Romero.
With “Beyond Society,” Netflix is in business with a top-tier creative Spanish creative.
Created by Spain‘s high-grossing director, J.A. Bayona, and Carles Torrens, “Beyond Society,” a three-part nonfiction follow-up to “Society of the Snow,” also underscores the fluid migration between film and TV of many of Spain’s top cineastes. The doc series seeks narrative and emotional closure for Bayona and the cast of the film as they visit the scene of the 1972 Andes Flight 571 crash, subject of the narrative feature “Society of the Snow.”
“It was there that we realized just how closely the true story and the people who lived through the tragedy were already intertwined with the fictional characters we had created,” Bayona has commented. “Beyond Society” traces the 50 years following the tragedy, giving voices to the survivors and the relatives of the deceased and how that flight forever marked the lives of a community.