“O Corno” wins the Golden Shell at the San Sebastián Festival

“O corno”, by the Basque director Jaione Camborda, a rural drama in Galicia at the end of the Franco regime, won this Saturday the Golden Shell of the 71st San Sebastian Festivalin a gala with a marked Argentine accent, with two awards for “Puan” and Horizontes Latinos for “El Castillo.”

Camborda, the fourth woman to win this award consecutively, has highlighted the importance of “the leaders who paved the way” in cinema and has shared the award with “the filmmakers who are yet to come.”

The Special Jury Prize, the second in importance, went to “Kalak”, a drama about child abuse by Swedish screenwriter and director Isabella Eklöf, which also won the award for best photography.

The Silver Shell for best direction has also gone to two women, Taiwanese Peng Tzu-Hui and Wang Ping-Wen for their debut feature, “A Journey in Spring,” a poetic portrait of marriage and grief shot in analogue. and in Taiwanese language.

If the main awards have been won by female directors, those for acting, which since 2021 have not distinguished gender categories, have gone to men.

The Silver Shell for best lead performance has gone, ex aequo, to the Argentine actor Marcelo Subioto, for the philosophical comedy “Puan” and the Japanese veteran Tatsuya Fuji, 82, for the drama about dementia “Great absence”. .

And the best supporting performance goes to the Spaniard of Armenian-Lebanese origin Hovik Keuchkerian, for his role in “Un amor”, by Isabel Coixet.

“Puan”, written and directed by Benjamin Naishtat and María Aiché, has also won the jury award for best script for a story set in the university world that invites us to put ego struggles aside to defend public education.

Naishtat, who in 2018 won the best director award for “Rojo” in this same competition, has dedicated this new recognition “to the teachers who taught us to write and think in the Argentine Republic.”

The Horizontes Latinos Award also travels to Argentina. The winner was “The Castle”, by Martín Benchimol, a story that combines documentary and fiction, which talks about class differences through the story of two women who inherit a decaying palace in the middle of the Argentine pampas.

Eduardo Williams, winner of the Zabaltegi Tabakalera award for “The Rise of the Human 3,” thanked all the Argentine teams for their presence in San Sebastián to “give visibility to the problem of culture and cinema” in his country, because of “the proposals neoliberals and fascists that some candidates are presenting.”

The jury that decided the award was chaired by the French filmmaker Claire Denis and was made up of the Spanish actress Vicky Luengo; China’s Fan Bingbing; the Colombian producer, director and writer Cristina Gallego; the French photographer Brigitte Lacombe; the Hungarian producer Robert Lantos and the German director Christian Petzold.

With information from EFE