A Conversation with José Luis Rebordinos, the Director of The San Sebastian International Film Festival, 2023

By Menene Gras Balaguer

The last edition of the San Sebastian International Film Festival has been the most Asian edition of the San Sebastián Festival, although the presence of films from this continent is not new, but it has simply been increasing over the last few years in the program of the different sections, both in the Official Section and in the New Directors and Kulinary sections. Although this presence has been uneven and, in all cases, has always been led by Japanese cinema, as it has been the case this year as well, the selection of Asian titles has been remarkable. The contribution to a global history of cinema comes from Asian cinema, and although Korean cinema and Chinese cinema have been increasingly visible, Japan has been particularly notable for anticipating the upcoming theatrical releases of films such as Hirokazu Koreeda’s Monster and Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days, The Evil Does Not Exist by Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Beyond the Fog by Kim No Focis or Great Absence by Kai Chika-Ora Japan’s leadership, with these and other titles, was completed by the Hiroshi Teshigahara Retrospective (1927-2001), which brought together more than twenty titles. A surprise for all the followers of Japanese classical cinema, which consisted in the screening of feature films, shorts and documentaries by this filmmaker who in the 1960s was part of the avant-garde that changed the way of seeing and understanding film production and the power of the moving image. This project is unique, as never before has such a collection of titles by this director been brought together.

On the other hand, in this edition of the festival, the virtual absence of Korea, except for the presentation of Past Lives. It is the directorial debut of Celine Song, who also wrote the screenplay, and the film will open in cinemas on November 3^rd. This somehow absence has nevertheless been somewhat compensated by the inclusion of other titles from countries such as Australia, with The Royal Hotel by Kitty Green (Official Selection); China with Carefree Days by Liang Min (New Directors) or A Journey in Spring by Chun Xing (Official Selection); Korea, with Past Lives by Celine Song (Perlak); India, with Bahadur the Brave (New Directors) and Damma Ki Katha by Nehal Vyes (Nest); Iran with Achilles by Faarhad Delaran (New Directors), Kazakhstan with Bauryna Salu by Askhat Kuchin (New Directors) and Vietnam with Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell and La Passion de Dodin Bouffant (Kulinary Section), a new gem by Tran Anh Hung, the former director of The Scent of Green Papaya. The festival opened on 22 September with Hayai Miyazaki’s latest film, The Boy and the Heron (2023), a risky and brave bet, but from an icon who never disappoints, which was not easy to achieve. A few more titles make up this Asian presence, whose diversity is a testament to the value of the underlying cultural identity and aesthetic discourse juxtaposed to the respective narratives being conveyed.

The festival has become an essential event for filmmakers and their teams, producers, distributors, the industry in general, professionals, audiences, and fans, making the city a meeting place that brings together a number of accredited visitors, which this year has exceeded five thousand between all the sectors involved in film and from all the countries that participate in one way or another in the festival. The first question I pose to its director, José Luis Rebordinos, has to do with how this has been achieved and how a city like San Sebastián can host all those who attend this annual event, which can be understood as a festival of festivals that selects the best titles that have been presented during the current year or that choose San Sebastián for their world premiere. The international date with this festival is unmissable for the world of cinema. Below, I reproduce the conversation held with José Luis Rebordinos during this year’s festival 2023 with the intention of transmitting his ideas regarding the programming and the cinema we see.

Personal contact, relations with authors and distributors always help, if not end up being fundamental to get a certain film. It is true that all this facilitates the management and traffic of films.

Q. How does the festival manage to gather as many visitors as those who come to this annual event, as well as the entire crews of some of the films presented, and how can the city assimilate or absorb all those who come from outside and need to stay for a few days here, as close as possible to the cinemas?

A. The fact is that the city receives as many visitors as those who appear here these days, and this is obviously interesting because it has an impact on the promotion of the city as a meeting place. But that can sometimes be a disadvantage, because suddenly you don’t have enough infrastructure to accommodate all those who want to come. For example, this year on the first weekend we ran out of rooms. All the hotels were full. There was not a single room left and the nearest accommodation was forty kilometers away, meaning that it was impossible to find viable alternatives. However, the city has a human dimension that favors meetings and contacts, which is not the case everywhere. For example, for people in the market or the film industry side, the María Cristina is the neural center, just as for the press that place is usually the Hotel Londres. In other words, there are areas where people usually meet. You go to the María Cristina and you can find someone from Steven Spielberg’s company, or Brad Pitt, as well as many Spanish producers having breakfast together. This creates synergies and relationships that are not possible in Cannes, because the festival is so big, so big, that it is more difficult to meet and get together. Of course, the Cannes festival is much more important and essential, but here are other things to be taken into account. Here the representatives of the different sectors can meet and work more easily and that not only makes it easier for them to do their business, but it is also generally more pleasant for them to do their work here.

Q. The festival program is distributed into the corresponding established sections, and I imagine that this is the best way for gathering the selected productions with a criterion that allows them to be differentiated from each other. Alternately, I think it’s very honest from your side to make it public that SSIFF brings together the most interesting titles from the most important international festivals that take place earlier in the year, as well as, of course, bringing together all the premieres that are within your reach.

A. As members of FIAP, we have an official section and a section dedicated to New Directors as you know. Both must include films that should be world premieres. In addition to these two sections, we have Perlak, Zabaltegi and Horizontes Latinos. On the other hand, San Sebastian is a festival of festivals. We are a festival that, by taking place at this time of the year, allows us to bring together the best of the year from all the festivals. I insist that the communication department must be aware of that, because it is not against a film but on the contrary it contributes to its promotion. For example, when you say that we are opening Zinemira with 20000 Species of Bees, it should be added that this film was in Berlin and that it triumphed in Malaga. Not only is it fair, but it also gives the public a new opportunity to see it. As well as bringing together the best of the year in these sections, we want some titles to be seen again by the media who have not been able to watch them and for the public to enjoy them again. The fact of collecting proposals that have interested us from other festivals is also a small tribute to our colleagues.

Q. What has changed in the recent years in this respect? What has happened to make the smaller festivals multiply alongside the larger ones like the one you direct, and with which it is difficult to compete for them? Distributors are committed to having their films at festivals such as the SSIFF, because the press coverage of their acquisitions is a way of highlighting what they want to buy and to sell. But they may often not pay the same attention to the small festivals which struggle to keep alive.

A. We are living at a time when things are constantly changing. Before, a film went to Venice or Cannes, and that was it, it was released worldwide. Now it’s not enough for them, now it’s in the interest of films to go to many festivals. You talk to the platforms, distributors and producers and they tell you that they are interested in doing Telluride, Toronto, San Sebastian, London, Zurich, Cannes, Venice, Rotterdam or Berlin. In short, Filmmakers are now convinced that they must make a circuit, because cinema no longer gives what it used to. You need to work much harder to make a smaller profit, so festivals become an important form of promotion that, in the end, costs very little to the industry. Increasingly, I think we have to be a little more generous in the selection process, not limiting ourselves to putting what we get first, but understanding that a film must have a festival route, and it’s a little bit the result of this that we understand our contribution.

Q. The geography of the festival is a global geography, although some nationalities have a greater presence than others, perhaps more peripheral to the SSIFF. In this sense, for Latin America it is fundamental to pass through your festival, because in a certain way the mere screening in an auditorium in the city during these dates can be decisive for the worldwide distribution of a film. At the same time, Asia is getting closer and closer. Is it here to stay, or is this inclusion in the SSIFF merely transitory?

A. Do you know what’s wrong with this? That, well, with Latin America, we have been keeping a very good relationship for many years, and we also have a delegate there. We see everything that is produced in Latin America, and it is rare that we miss something. This has been the case for years. In Asia, we have been working for some time on what is being done in China, but especially in Japan and Korea. In Japan, we are becoming more and more known. The deputy director and I often go to the Tokyo Film festival. We are invited to see the latest films being made there. We usually take part in many activities, and we always go with a small agenda of appointments. But in the end it’s no longer who we want to see, Asian producers and distributors are the ones who call us and want to see us. That’s the difference. We have more Asian films too, because they offer us more things and we have more opportunities to see them. For example, a film that I like a lot like Great Absence (2023), by the Japanese director Kei Chikaura, was not easy to get. Nevertheless, the fact that we met five years ago with its director made things much easier. It was a film he had presented in Toronto and which we had liked very much. When we met him again and told him that we wanted to watch his second film, it was himself who told us “Here is the film and I want you to see it”. Why? Because there is a lot of previous work that makes things happen as we expect them to. Not only with this director, but with many other people.

Q. Indeed, personal contact, relations with authors and distributors always help, if not end up being fundamental to get a certain film. It is true that all this facilitates the management and traffic of films. But, first and foremost, what is valued is the programming of a festival, the response of the audiences, the number of accreditation holders, the presence in the media and the capacity to promote a product. And the festival you run does all this and it is considered a brand that has nothing to envy to the festivals of Cannes, Berlin, or Locarno, to give an example. How do you manage to make this happen?

A. We see a film like Chie Hayakawa’s Plan 75 (2022), which shows program to exterminate adults over 75 years old and which was pre-nominated for the Oscars, and we decide to go for it. We liked the film, travelled to Tokyo, and met the producer and the director. In this way we made a lot of contacts. With 101 Flowers, a film that took Japan by storm and whose director is a writer, we were all over the news after it won an award at San Sebastián. To make this happen, we went to Japan, we met Genki Kawamura, its director, and we got the response we were hoping for. The personal contact, the relationships with authors and distributors, and the friendship that we sometimes establish with each other, makes things much easier …”. It’s about going to the territories, getting to know the people, and getting them to know us. We already have that with Latin America, almost as a matter of course, so it’s enough for us to go there once a year. We go to Ventana Sur, the biggest audiovisual content market in Latin America, where we find all the Latin American cinema in a single city like Buenos Aires. And we usually come back with all the contacts. On the other hand, Latin American cinema wants to be in San Sebastian, and all the filmmakers send us their latest productions. Well, we are achieving this little by little, especially with Japan, but also with Korea and China. Other places like Taiwan and Vietnam are also starting to show interest in San Sebastian.

Q. Indeed, I believe that the San Sebastian Film Festival is a festival of festivals that is much better known internationally than it may seem at first glance and that it is now on the map of directors and distributors, both from Central Asian countries and from Southeast Asia and Asia Pacific. Many distributors from this continent let us know that before giving us a film to AFFBCN, they would be willing to offer it to the SSIFF. The festival has an international prestige thanks to its undisputed consolidation.

A. Maybe it’s true, but what I can assure you is that in Japan the city of San Sebastian is very well known, because of the festival and because of the gastronomy, and because we combine the two things. I think that in the end the festivals, all of us, promote our country, and we also promote the films we bring and the countries we bring with them, and their cultural identities. For instance, in the first years of my directorship, we didn’t have much contact with Japan, and if we did, it was through the Kulinary section, which we even co-produced with a Japanese festival. It was even the case that some films in this section preferred to come to San Sebastian rather than Berlin. Even if we said Come to Berlin and then bring the film to San Sebastian, because we had no problem for them to go first to another festival like the Berlinale, nor did we need them to give us the world premiere, they told us that they preferred to come to San Sebastian first. And Berlin is a much bigger and more important festival than us, that’s how it is. But what’s going on? That Basque gastronomy seemed so important to them that they didn’t want to give up coming to our festival first. No, no, no, no, this is a first gastronomy, and we want to be in the Basque Country was one of their arguments. The Basque Country is very famous, the whole of Spain is very famous for its gastronomy, but the Basque Country in particular. On the other hand, I think that the festival, like all festivals, to a greater or lesser extent, we are ambassadors for the city and the country where they take place. Many people get to know Spain or the Basque Country through film festivals. Then, I think that our politicians should be more aware of the economic repercussions of this type of celebration. I could mention, but I can’t, because that is confidential, the number of Hollywood stars who come to San Sebastian during the year, almost more than at the festival, in a confidential way. Because many of them contact us, we make hotel reservations for them under a false name, we book restaurants for them, and why do they come? Because one day they came to the festival, they loved the city and suddenly they come to celebrate New Year’s Eve in Spain. And they come with their family, they stay in a hotel in the city, and they go to a restaurant with three Michelin stars for dinner. That happens to us quite a lot. If people saw the list of names of those who visit the city, they wouldn’t believe it.

Q. Japan’s presence this year has been more than evident in terms of the interest you have shown for years in Japanese cinema, both classic and contemporary, which for you is undoubtedly unquestionable, because of all that it reveals to us and because it has never ceased to surprise you. You are a real fan of Japanese culture and Japanese cinema and you have not failed to make this known. This year, for example, the programme was not only the most Asian but also the most Japanese of all the editions you have directed to date.

A. Yes, probably because I think Japan is the country with the strongest film industry now, and above all because in Japan, what we are finding is a lot of first films and a lot of people starting out, which we find very interesting. We are coming across this very often. That’s why there are also several short films from Japan this year. In addition, we usually follow up with those directors who have already been here once or more times with their respective films. In fact, now we are going to the Tokyo Film Festival at the end of October and we already have a lot of appointments with directors and producers who are going to have films for the last period of next year, that is, they could be in San Sebastian as world premieres, or if they go to Cannes or Venice first, they could be in parallel sections of SSIFF. We do a lot of monitoring, and a festival as big as ours must have a strong documentation department, a support department. So, for me, the key to a festival is to be very clear about the procedure and the steps that must be taken to get a certain production. In our work there are three phases, the first is information, so we need to have and maintain a good database. This means knowing what is being done, even before a project has started production, knowing what projects are in progress, knowing what stage of production they are in, knowing when shooting is finished and knowing when editing will be finished. The steps to take are as follows: first, get the information about the product; then seduce the director, the producer, or the distributor to let you see the film and to give you the film if you are interested in it. But finally, follow up, which is as important as everything else, because it’s not enough to get out of a hurry or to have a production and forget about it, because then you’re not going anywhere and you’re not likely to get anything else, especially if you’ve liked it and the audience has liked it.

Q. The procedure seems obvious, but negotiating from a platform like the festival you run is much easier, because in fact you don’t have to knock on the door of any distributor or director, but rather they come to you to buy the product, whereas smaller festivals have to make a big effort to be attended to and get a positive response for productions that have other aspirations.

A. I remember Hiroshi Okuyama, the director of Jesus (2018), who won the Kutxabank-New Directors Award for this film that I am very excited about. Now I know he is making a new film that looks amazing. We met him three years ago, before he had the project underway, and last year he told us that they were already shooting. We are still in constant contact with him because the film will soon be ready, and we could programme it for the next edition of the festival. It’s possible that it will go to a big festival first, but that doesn’t mean we won’t program it in San Sebastian, because the project is very beautiful, and this guy is very talented. So, the process starts with getting the information, then, well, seducing, that is, convincing them that you are a good place, accompanying them, letting them know that you are interested, that they see your interest. And finally, if you get the film, to follow up afterwards, not to end the relationship when you put the film on but to follow their work, we do that a lot with Latin America because we are very close to them, we know them, and we are starting to do it with Asia, especially with some countries where we are entering.

Q. By the way, Korea has not played a special role in this edition of SSIFF, except for the screening of Past Lives (2023) written and directed by Celine Song, which has received different responses, and which will soon be released in all theatres.

A. For Korea, we have had a delegate for some time now, Roberto Cueto, and we are noticing this in terms of the presence of this country at the festival. The thing is that this year the production that has been made in this country has not particularly caught our attention. In terms of new films, we haven’t seen anything that we should have. We always program the winning film from the Jeonju festival, every year we have the winner from Jeonju, but this time what we have seen at this festival has not convinced us. This year has not been a good year for Korean cinema. Which doesn’t mean anything because next year everything can change. We only had Past Lives, which I wouldn’t consider particularly representative of current Korean cinema either.

Q. I don’t know if you would like to recommend any of the films you have programmed for the festival or if you prefer to remain discreet in this regard. It’s important for us to agree. Some films are programmed for our festival, the AFFBCN, and I’m happy to know that they are also here, that their directors are coming and that we can interview them, and even know that it’s a way of sharing one choice rather than another.

A. I can’t recommend anything publicly. Personally, I can tell you not to miss a film if you want, but not much more. For example, speaking of Asian cinema, I really like a film like Beyond the Fog, because it has something very special. And then, have you seen Carefree Days? It’s very good. I like Carefree Days a lot too, first because the team seems like they’re going to do things, and because they’re very much sponsored by Marco Müller, who is the one who really showed me the film. Also, it’s an urban and young people’s film, and it’s not so easy to see films from a generation of young people living in the new Chinese cities. Above all, I am interested to see what is happening now in the country, and this film reflects that. Another very powerful film is Great Absence, although it is a bit long. It talks about Alzheimer’s, which is a very frequent theme in Japanese cinema, because in a way this is due to the long life of its population, and it is a big social problem. Great Absence is finally quite a classic film, theoretically, but then you see other things and the director is very brilliant.

Q. Sometimes I like to say that SSIFF is the Spanish Cannes and that it has nothing to envy its counterpart, without wanting to make comparisons in vain. But, this year, for example, the programming of this festival has in many cases not been the best, and it seems that there were some titles that one doesn’t expect this festival to accept, and one wonders why they are there.

A. I’m a big fan of Cannes, and I defend the Cannes Film Festival to death. Frémaux, his director, is a friend of mine, but not only because of that, but because he does a great job, and every edition is different. I think the Quinzaine is looking for its place because there have been changes in the direction. But I think that, if you look at Cannes as a whole, it’s a big party, that is, there are many important films, many of which we have recovered for selection. The bigger you are, the more you’re in bondage. I was doing a week of fantasy and horror films in Donosti and as it was a small festival, I could do whatever I wanted. We felt completely free. At SSIFF we are quite free, but not one hundred percent. Why? Because you must conceive a program that pleases and interests the public, while considering the critics and the sponsors. This balance is not easy. But we are much freer at that level than Cannes can be because we have less pressure. Cannes is a festival that is a national affair. I’m not going to get a call from the Minister of Culture to tell me to show one film instead of another. But at Cannes, the minister of the day can call and say that a film should not be screened, because it is enough for him to appear to be interested in a certain title and to make it known that he misses it, to make the message clear.

Q. The SSIFF repeats its success, in terms of the number of accredited visitors and audiences, whose number seems to be increasing, with an extensive program, which brings together the best of the year, and making it a meeting place to go to keep up to date and establish or maintain contacts, I am referring above all to the press and industry.

A. Well, last year there were 4500, this year I think there are quite a few more. Above all, in terms of the presence of industry. Twelve years ago, we had 500 participants in this area, and last year there were 2080, and this year I think we are going to be around 2200, in other words, the number is increasing exponentially. We have more than a thousand accredited media. The rest are guests, directors, and crews of the films we present. That’s quite a lot for a festival like ours and I hope the number keeps growing.