The San Sebastian Film Festival has confirmed the lineup of filmmakers that will participate in the New Directors programme at this year’s festival, which is set to run from September 18 to 26. Scroll down for the full lineup.
Filmmakers from Bulgaria, Chile, Germany, Iran, Japan, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Norway, South Korea, Spain, Taiwan, the UK and Ukraine will present their first and second feature films in the New Directors sidebar.
The Bad Son (El mal hijo), the debut feature by Jaime Lorente, will open the sidebar. The film’s official synopsis reads: When 11-year-old Ruben’s father mysteriously disappears, the boy has to move in with his grandmother, a woman he barely knows. In a rural setting where time seems to have stood still, the child will learn that family wounds are passed down from one generation to another, and will try to find a way to heal them as he grows.
New Directors will close with Billy Lumby’s debut film Florid. The film follows a young man who struggles to balance his mental problems, medication, and drugs with his musical ambitions. The official synopsis reads: Jamal, who has a diagnosis of schizophrenia, lives in a supported housing block, alongside other people with mental health issues. Frustrated by the side effects of his medication, he stops taking it, making the voices he hears become more frequent and extreme. Increasingly changeable in mood, Jamal builds a friendship with Kyla, another resident. But as the voices become more intense, Jamal must confront the blurred line between reality and past family events to come to terms with his voices.
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San Sebastian announced further titles from its official competition earlier this week. Titles set for the Spanish fest include Mike Leigh’s latest feature Tender Loving Care and My Sad Dead, a new series from Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín.
My Sad Dead will screen at San Sebastian in its feature-length format. Starring are Mercedes Morán, Dolores Fonzi, and Carolina Álvarez. The project is based on four short stories by Mariana Enríquez, and tells the story of Ema, a woman with the ability to see and hear the dead.
Leigh’s Tender Loving Care will arrive at San Sebastian after a showing at TIFF. Marion Bailey, Paul Jesson, Kate O’Flynn, and Alice Bailey Johnson star in the film. No synopsis for Tender Loving Care has been provided on either the San Sebastian or TIFF website. San Sebastian simply describes the film as an “insightful exploration of the contemporary world.”
The 2026 New Directors Lineup:
El mal hijo / The Bad Son
Jaime Lorente (Spain)
Country(ies) of production: Spain. Cast: Miguel Ángel Puro, Susi Sanchéz, Hugo Arbués, Óscar de la Fuente, Abel de la Fuente
Opening Film
When 11-year-old Ruben’s father mysteriously disappears, the boy has to move in with his grandmother, a woman he barely knows. In a rural setting where time seems to have stood still, the child will learn that family wounds are passed down from one generation to another, and will try to find a way to heal them as he grows.
Florid
Billy Lumby (United Kingdom)
Country(ies) of production: United Kingdom – Sweden. Cast: Jonathan Jules, Saskia Chana, Unknown T
Closing Film
Jamal, who has a diagnosis of schizophrenia, lives in a supported housing block, alongside other people with mental health issues. Frustrated by the side effects of his medication, he stops taking it, making the voices he hears become more frequent and extreme. Increasingly changeable in mood, Jamal builds a friendship with Kyla, another resident. But as the voices become more intense, Jamal must confront the blurred line between reality, and past family events, to come to terms with his voices.
Bloques erráticos / Erratics
Thomas Woodroffe (Chile)
Country(ies) of production: Chile – France – Argentina. Cast: Denis Lavant, Daniel Muñoz
Freeing himself after spending a hundred years trapped in a glacier, the ghost of the filmmaker Lucien Castelnau wanders through a futuristic Patagonia, where technological progress clashes with forgotten stories. Unable to rest while his cinematic legacy remains unseen, he crosses a world that has deleted him from its memory, in search of a place in history and of spectators, who can finally bring his lost work back to life.
Body of Glass
Naëmi Ada (Germany)
Country(ies) of production: Germany – France. Cast: Soma Pysall, Elise Tilloloy, Manuel Severin, Younès Boucif
After a violent incident with her controlling partner Felix, dancer Tian flees their shared life in Marseille. Isolated and desperate for connection, she infiltrates the grieving circle of a young man she never knew. But as she becomes entangled in their mourning and affection, she hides a dangerous secret at home. When lies, grief and reality collapse into each other, Tian must choose whether to break the cycle.
Cute
Marlene Emilie Lyngstad (Norway)
Country(ies) of production: Denmark – Sweden – Norway. Cast: Jan Gunnar Røise, Gina Jaqueline , Karin Bertling, Kitt Maiken Mortensen, Molly Kirk Rasmussen
Troubled by forbidden feelings for his seven-year-old stepdaughter, Richard decides to leave his girlfriend. He retreats to his childhood home to renovate ahead of its sale, but his self-imposed exile is disrupted by the childlike presence of his mother’s caregiver, Stella. He soon discovers her double life as a Lolita camgirl, and the two develop a transgressive surrogate father-daughter relationship. Their constructed reality begins to unravel when the stepdaughter he left behind reaches out.
Esta soledad / This Solitude
Javier Giner (Spain)
Country(ies) of production: Spain. Cast: Oriol Pla, Marina Salas, Gemma Martínez, Kai Etxaniz, Itziar Lazkano
Leo and Lorea have loved one another. Maybe they still do. But something in them has broken. After five years, their relationship is done. He looks after his sick father, trapped between responsibility and an emotional void that weighs him down. She, caught up in poorly-paid jobs and personal crises, tries to get her life back on track without really knowing where to begin. They are two bodies, tired and alone, pierced by their precarious situation, by unresolved issues, by the emotional legacy of a generation who always seem to come late to everything: to love, to stability, to maturity, to serenity, to personal satisfaction.
Lovers Sleep Alone
Massih Parsaei (Iran)
Country(ies) of production: Germany. Cast: Pooyesh Frozandeh, Ava Darvishi, Marcel Kohler, Wolfgang Wobéto
WIP Europa 2025
Iman has built his life in Berlin around absence. From his family, from Iran, from being known. He fills the silence with work, invented stories, and nights with a man he meets for sex in the park. When his cousin, whom he barely knows, arrives from Tehran for a brief visit, what he left behind quietly finds its way back to him.
Morro
Rodrigo García Saiz (Mexico)
Country(ies) of production: Mexico. Cast: Gustavo Sánchez Parra, Anna Diaz, Ernesto Meléndez
Mateo is a small-town vet. Since his son died, he has lived a life of silent routines and nameless guilt. The violence of the place isn’t immediately visible: it sits there, lurking, like a never-ending echo. This fragile balance is broken when Mateo has to heal Morro, the local capo’s injured dog. The animal’s everyday care leads to an unexpected bond: a relationship with neither judgement nor words, that enables Mateo to recover the meaning of life.
Mugalim
Ayana Nurdinova (Kazakhstan)
Country(ies) of production: Kazakhstan. Cast: Oljas Dalelkhan, Rustem Zhanyamanov, Shynar Janysbekova, Olga Landina, Gulnara Dusmatova, Akif Petrov, Madina Yesmanova, Anna Starchenko, Ruslan Duysembekov
Zhandos, a music teacher, lives in the small town of Balkhash and dreams of moving to a big city. He is loved by his students, and the school turns a blind eye to his side jobs. When a patron nostalgic for his hometown arrives, Zhandos is given a chance to leave. He must decide what matters more: the art within him, or himself within art.
Obuvkite na bashta mi / My Father’s Shoes
Hristo Simeonov (Bulgaria)
Country(ies) of production: Bulgaria – France. Cast: Valeria Varbanova, Tanya Shahova, Vyara Kolarova
Mima has grown up in the shadow of her father’s absence, raised by her uncompromising mother, Boyka. When news of his death arrives, and his body returns to their village, recognition becomes both duty and dilemma. As Boyka refuses to face the man she once loved, mother and daughter confront a silent past, forcing Mima to decide what it means to inherit a life she never chose.
Ri Guang / Will You Still Be My Friend
Lu Po-Shun (Taiwan)
Country(ies) of production: Taiwan – Singapore. Cast: Jaden Wang, Aloysius Looi, Lung Tien Hsiang, Lu Yi-Ching, Andie Chen, Kate Pang
Amid an escalating feud in a rural Taiwanese village, a boy struggles to protect his secret friendship with his Singapore-raised best friend as adult conflicts threaten to tear them apart, while he quietly begins to question the true nature of his feelings for his friend.
Sieben Tage Februar / February, Seven Days
Tatjana Moutchnik (Ukraine)
Country(ies) of production: Germany – Austria – Spain. Cast: Serhii Korshykov, Volodymyr Holosniak, Maria Shtofa, Arsenii Markov, Moisej Bazijan, Daria Guitbout
WIP Europa 2025
Two different notions of family identity clash when a man from Odesa and his son visit his brother in Germany for the funeral of their mother, the day before the Ukraine war breaks out.
The Ballet Lesson
Kazuya Murayama (Japan)
Country(ies) of production: Japan. Cast: Vadim Bushmakin, Nikita Kondo, Niina Kondo, Yukina Shimizu
In a provincial Japanese town, Japanese-Russian siblings Nikita and Nina live an isolated life with their Russian grandparents, knowing their absent parents only through stories. When their father Nikolai suddenly returns, he takes them on a journey to see their mother Yuki, a Japanese ballet dancer. Along the way, the children discover unfamiliar landscapes, brief encounters, and the fragile bonds of family.
The World Before
Yoon Dan-bi (South Korea)
Country(ies) of production: South Korea – Japan – France. Cast: Su-bin Sim, Eo-jin Kim
Seventeen-year-old Jin has never left the island where she was born—a place with no road to the mainland, where the sea quietly sets the rhythm of everyday life. When Dujae returns for his grandmother’s funeral, he stays alone in the house she left behind. Jin begins finding small excuses to visit him, and little by little, seeing him becomes part of her everyday life. As summer wears on, the island she has always known begins to feel unfamiliar—the roads, the sea, the faces around her, all subtly transformed. Jin finds herself looking at it, and at herself, for the first time. But summer, like everything else on the island, will not stay.
