The San Sebastian Film Festival is shining the light on female filmmakers from across Latin America with the lineup for its Horizontes Latinos sidebar section. Eight of the 12 features in this year’s program, which San Sebastian unveiled on Thursday, are from female directors, including A Ravaging Wind from Argentine filmmaker Paula Hernández, which will open the section. All 12 films come from directors of Latino origin and were entirely or partially produced in Latin America but have not yet been released in Spain.
A Ravaging Wind is Hernández’s adaptation of Selva Almada’s novel of the same name and follows the story of a preacher and his daughter whose car breaks down during their latest mission to spread the gospel. Hernández’s 2019 feature The Sleepwalkers also screened in San Sebastian’s Horizontes Latinos sidebar.
Also returning to Horizontes Latinos are Tatiana Huezo (2021’s Prayers for the Stolen), who will bring her Mexican documentary The Echo, winner of the best documentary prize and the best director honor for the Encounters section of the Berlin film festival this year, to San Sebastian; Brazilian director Carolina Markowicz (2022’s Charcoal) with Toll, her second feature, about a highway toll worker desperate to change her gay son; and Lucía Puenzo (2013’s The German Doctor) who will screen her fifth feature, Los impactados, about a woman who struggles with physical and psychological changes after she is struck by lightning.
The section this year features three female directorial debuts: María Zanetti’s Alemania, which won the ArteKino International Award at the Europe-Latin America Co-Production Forum in 2021; the mother-son drama Blondi from actress-turned-director Dolores Fonzi (Truman); and Camila Fabbri’s Clara Gets Lost in the Woods, which, like Blondi, features the director in the leading role, here as a woman confronted by a traumatic incident in her past. Mexican director Lila Avilés, whose feature debut The Chambermaid premiered in San Sebastian’s New Directors section in 2018 and who served on the Horizontes Award jury in 2021, will show her sophomore effort, Totem in Horizontes Latinos this year. The feature, which premiered in Berlin, follows a 7-year-old girl who looks on as her family foundations crumble.
Also screening in the Horizontes Latinos are Martín Benchimol’s The Castle, Guto Parente’s A Strange Path, David Zonana’s Heroic, and Felipe Gálvez’s The Settlers.
The 2023 San Sebastian film festival runs Sept. 22-30.
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