San Sebastian Interntional Film Festival 2026 (SSIFF 2026) Gender Report – Jennifer Green reports
Former festival deputy director Maialen Beloki was selected last spring as the San Sebastian International Film Festival’s new director starting with next year’s 75th edition, replacing the long-serving José Luis Rebordinos. She will be the festival’s first female director and is set to lead an executive team currently made up of mostly women. The festival also announced this year that it will honor a female producer of one of the eight films screening in three key competitive sections with its RTVE-Otra Mirada Award. The prize, which has traditionally focused on films about women, will now recognize “the key role of female producers as the essential cog of audiovisual creation.”
Four of the competition films in the Official Selection this year are directed by women. They include: 7:40 ce matin-la (Milo) from France’s Nicole Garcia and starring Marion Cotillard as a woman recently out of jail who takes on a waitress job in a café to get closer to a young boy who works in the area; first-time feature director Maha Harada from Japan, whose Muyou no Hito (In My Father’s Room) is based on her own novel about a museum worker who receives a mysterious key that unlocks the room once used by her late father; previous Golden Shell winner Yesim Ustaoglu’s Artakalan (What Remains), about a female poet on a journey of self-discovery; and Swedish filmmaker Amanda Kernell’s Garrat du Vaimmu (Brace Your Heart), about a woman who inherits her late father’s reindeer herd.
According to SSIFF’s annual gender identity report, published last January, 30% of competition films last year were directed by women, down from 43% the year before. Both numbers are higher than this year, which is just shy of 24%. The report found that the average participation of women professionals in the 3,200 films viewed by the selection committee last year ranged from 15% to 39% depending on roles: production (39%), screenplay (33%), direction (32%) and editing (31%).
While the number of films submitted and viewed is “a matter dependent on general production,” as the festival noted in a press release, “the responsibility for those selected falls upon the Festival,” and the 174 films programmed for 2025 had a higher proportion of women screenwriters, directors, music composers and editors than the total number of films viewed.
The festival’s Made in Spain section last year also showed greater gender parity last year, with 55% of women screenwriters, 53% of women directors and 52% of women editors, although the gender report noted that “male authorship is higher in all professions, with the exception of art direction” in the Spanish films submitted for selection. This year, the country’s Association of Women Filmmakers and Audiovisual Media (CIMA) reported that only 5 of 25 productions and co-productions from Spain (23 features and 2 series) included in the festival line-up are directed by women, and none are competing for the top Golden Shell award in the fest’s main competition.
