Human Rights FIlm Festival

This past week was the 20th San Sebastian Human Rights Film Festival. We have gone to a few movies at this festival over the years, but never more than one or two in a year. This year, we got tickets to five movies (only four for Shana). Unfortunately, we were fairly unimpressed with the movies.

The first movie we saw was 20,000 Species of Bees. The movie drew a large crowd as it was set in the Basque Country (in Spanish and Basque with Spanish subtitles). The story of a young boy (age 8) who wants to be a girl. We felt it was not very well done as there was a lot of extraneous plot lines that did not really seem to move the story along. The performance by the lead young actress was very good (she won best actress at the Berlin Film Festival), but the movie was just ok.

The second movie, which I attended alone, was Mariupolis 2.  It was a documentary set in the city of Mariupol, Ukraine in March 2022. The story, such as it was, followed a group of people who had taken refuge in a church in that city after their homes had been destroyed by bombings. I was less than impressed by the film because the director (who sadly was killed toward the end of filming) seemed to believe that a documentary basically involved turning the camera on and just leaving it running. So, there was very little dialogue, and much of what there was involved the people just talking to each other rather than to the camera. There were some scary moments when bombs sounded like they were landing quite close to the church, but other than showing how terrifying being in the middle of a war zone is (duh!), I didn't feel like the movie did much.

The third movie we saw was Victim. Set in the Czech Republic, the protagonists are a teenage Ukrainian refugee and his mother. But, what the movie is actually about is anti-Romani (Gypsy) predjudice. This is demonstrated when the young Ukrainian is allegedly beaten up by three unknown assailants, and everyone assumes that the perpetrators are Roma. In fact, he fell trying a stunt. Frankly, the whole story didn't really work either to address this issue or to make the movie interesting.

Cabeza y Corazon (Head and Heart) was a documentary about Spain's women's wheelchair basketball team, and its attempt to qualify for the Tokyo paralympic games. (Spain's team had never made the games before.) Once again, the director did not follow what we think of as "normal" procedure in a documentary and talk to, well, anyone. The film simply involved turning the camera on and following the players through some practices and a couple of tournaments, which led to them qualifying (of course). Although there are some interesting scenes as the women make their way through the cities where the tournaments are held, it was really difficult to connect with the players since you don't learn much of their back stories.

Finally, we saw Las Buenas Companias (In Good Company), which won the top award at the festival. Based on real events that took place in the Basque town of Errenteria between 1977 and 1985, the film follows a group of young women (ages perhaps 16 to 22) who helped less-wealthy women obtain abortions during a time when they were completely illegal in Spain (wealthy women simply flew to London). In addition, the film shows the young women protesting everything from the anti-abortion law, to misconduct by men, to the institution of marriage itself. And sometimes in very creative ways. The film focuses on the budding relationship between Bea and Miren, who is pregnant. The movie itself is a bit slow, but it does address an important tactic for contesting unjust laws through mutual assistance. At the end, we learn that between 1977 and 1985 (when abortion was legalized in Spain), the young women represented in the film helped over 1,000 women obtain abortions.

Of the movies we saw, only Mariupolis 2 had subtitles in English. Otherwise, we watched with Spanish subtitles. We were proud of our ability to understand, although the very colloquial speech of  Las Buenas Companias was sometimes difficult to follow. Hopefully next year we will get some better movies.

Our readers will have surely noticed that with our return to San Sebastian, the pace of our posts has declined significantly. We hope to return to our normal pace of two posts a month in May and June before we head out on our next trip (France, Germany and Luxembourg) in early July. Thanks for continuing to check in.

Hasta pronto,

Jeff and Shana