Spain’s Valladolid International Film Festival – known in Spain as Seminci – opens Friday, Oct. 23 with 30 world premieres and a lineup bringing together some of international cinema’s most acclaimed auteurs and an emerging generation of Spanish filmmakers. Running through Oct. 31, the festival’s 71st edition features 22 films in official competition and 208 titles overall — 137 features and 71 shorts — including 121 premieres. The gathering is being steered by two longtime members of the team that helped shape Seminci’s recent artistic identity.
Mariona Viader, previously general coordinator, and Javier H. Estrada, formerly head of programming, have stepped in as interim co-directors following the death of dynamic festival director José Luis Cienfuegos in December, maintaining the programming vision he introduced in 2023. The selection embraces widely different approaches to filmmaking, from formally experimental work to more accessible independent productions, while exploring political upheaval, memory, exile and intimate family relationships.
Among the contenders for Valladolid’s top prize, the Golden Spike, are May el-Toukhy’s “Woman Unknown,” winner of Venice’s Golden Lion, and İlker Çatak’s Berlin Golden Bear winner “Yellow Letters.” “When we selected the films for Seminci, we had no idea ‘Woman Unknown’ would win the Golden Lion,” Estrada says. Elsewhere in the competition, Alain Gomis’ “Dao” connects a wedding in France with a memorial ceremony in Guinea-Bissau, weaving family histories across continents. In “Double Freedom,” Lisandro Alonso returns to the world of his breakthrough “La libertad” 25 years later, revisiting ideas of solitude and independence.
In Markus Schleinzer’s “Rose,” Berlin best performance winner Sandra Hüller plays a woman passing herself off as a man in 17th-century Europe. Lance Hammer’s “Queen at Sea,” starring Juliette Binoche and Tom Courtenay, turns to the complexities of family relationships. Bernardo Bertolucci’s final co-written screenplay provides the basis for Andrea Pallaoro’s “The Echo Chamber,” starring Alicia Vikander and Susan Sarandon.
The festival’s opening and closing films reinforce its mix of distinctive filmmaking voices and international star power. Hungarian director Lili Horvát, who won Valladolid’s Golden Spike in 2020, returns with “My Notes on Mars,” starring Mackenzie Davis (“Blade Runner 2049”). Gael García Bernal closes the event with “Hombre al agua,” his third directorial feature.
While many of the international competition titles have already made their mark on the festival circuit, 30 films — just over half of them Spanish productions or co-productions — will face their first audiences at Seminci. We have to take care of each film. But it’s also a cause for celebration.
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