I only remember one winning film from the San Sebastian Festival. It was called A place in the world and I have forgotten the year. That says a lot about my bad memory but, above all, about my little attachment to the seventh art. I remember - yes - I cried and that the main actors were Federico Luppi , Cecilia Roth , Pepe Sacristán and some more that escapes me. If I now add that the movie was Hispanic-Argentine, they'll take me for asshole. Well it was.

Making an effort I could remember other winning films in San Sebastian, but I think none of them would reach the level of A place in the world , directed by Adolfo Aristarain . It was a deliciously progressive, committed and sentimental film. At that time it took much progress as opposed to the face, which did not take anything. Progressive meant advanced and carca, retrograde. One day, in a radio show, a contorted tooth tertullian used the word progressive with disdainful mood, and since then the adjective is a fashionable insult.

This year the festival is proving movidito. Maybe the confrontation between progres and carcas returns, who knows. I have not seen the Amenábar movie, but it strikes me that it is devoid of ideological protocols. The director's biography, however, speaks for itself: he was born in Chile, returned to Spain in the middle of the Pinochet era and met Madrid from a campsite. To the best of my knowledge, Amenábar did not have in his living room "the portrait of a grandfather who won a battle," as León Felipe said, but he has read everything about Unamuno and Millán Astray .

Like Amenábar, this year's Donostia award is also a hybrid: Greek by birth and French by adoption. His name is Costa-Gavras and he is the film director who has given life to Varufakis .

To Costa, which is actually called Constantine, life led him along the path of cinema and politics (communist era). Now he goes on to say that "the right, unlike the left, knows what he wants," and that means that communism left him parked. Gone is the history of films that marked a generation: Capital , Z , L'aveu , State of siege , Missing , etc. I saw some. I could not explain why they caught my attention. If it was for the movies themselves or for him, that seemed very attractive to me.

Now he is older, has white hair and has also lost redness along the way. Of course that happens here too: almost everyone has changed sides.

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