Key emerging Catalan filmmakers at San Sebastián are raising their game, in larger scale, genre blending, visual ambition and more involved storytelling. They have very good reason Over 2019-25, annual Catalan government general cinema funding soared from €12.5 million ($14.4 million) in 2019 to €30.2 million ($34.8 million) in just specific support lines. Now, however, the films that are being made are also getting bigger, as a new generation of filmmakers and TV creatives emerged over the last decade raise their game in their artistic ambitions and production values.
New movies at San Sebastián from rapidly consolidating Catalan or Catalonia-based writers and directors is a case in point. Mikel Gurrea’s main competition player “Saints,” for example, launches as a mini visual mystery thriller. Distant lights – maybe car lights or fireflies – dance across a pitch-black night scene.
They are finally revealed as the head-lamps of a gang of thieves, robbing a church, caught closer up, their faces occasionally emerging from the gloom. Cleverly, in visual terms, not dialog, Gurrea not just launches the film but anticipates its focus: This is an identity drama, this focus becoming how late-20s Lali establishes her priorities, between a chosen family – an elite band of church artefacts thieves – and her biological family, her dying mother. That budget spike can be put down to spiraling production costs and a film “more complex in terms of locations, number of characters and overall production values,” she adds.
Written and starring Berto Romero, “5 More Minutes” delivers a reportedly excruciatingly comedic sci-fi thriller as an on-the-rocks couple are caught in a time loop at a rural getaway. Suddenly, a world of normal multi-shot set-ups morphs into one of millimetrically calculated five-minute sequence shots, film at the same time of 6.35 p.m. to achieve similar light conditions. None of which as an easy task. 2018’s “Land of Loneliness” (“Con el viento”), Meritxell Colell’s first fiction feature, unspooled in a Spanish village.
Her third, “Far From the Trees,” one of Locarno biggest winners this August, begins in the Amazon jungle, so0n moves to Peru’s highlands, following Adela, a sound artist recording endangered languages. The locations can be eye-catching. What quickly dazzles, however, is an intricate mix of present and past, collective and personal memory, of the archive footage of the Catalan diaspora after the Spanish Civil War and scenes of Adela as a child, and a present in a film which speaks about family, forced exile, roots, memory and identity.
Aiming to raise the ante in style and scale, cineastes are emboldened by success, theirs and of others. Over the last decade, Catalan productions have won Best First Feature (“Summer 1993”), a Golden Bear (Alcarràs,” also from Carla Simón) and Best Leading Performance (“20,000 Species of Bees”) at the Berlin Film Festival. Smaller films have also triumphed: “The Good Daughter,” now playing at San Sebastián, scooped top prizes at Tallinn Black Nights Festival, last year; “Forastera,” directed by Lucía Aleñar Iglesias, won a Fipresci Prize at 2025’s Toronto.
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