Nest 2023

Thirteen short films have been selected for the Nest section among 421 proposals from 209 schools in 53 countries. Never before had so many submissions been received in the history of the San Sebastian Festival’s international film students meeting.

Organised by the San Sebastian Festival and the Tabakalera international centre for contemporary culture, the Nest section presents the work of students from film schools around the globe, the moviemakers of the future. As well as offering a place to show and check out short films, Nest provides a meeting place for students, filmmakers, industry professionals and the audience: a space fitted out by the Festival to prompt conversation on the cinema and to foster the coming together between education and the professional world.

An objective also promoted by THE MEDIAPRO STUDIO Master’s Degree in Screenwriting, with which San Sebastian Festival has signed a collaboration agreement referring to Nest, under which ten students from different editions of the Master’s Degree in Screenwriting will participate in the activities organised by Nest during the Festival, including screenings of the selected shorts, talks and masterclasses by industry professionals and prestigious international filmmakers screening their films in one of the festival’s competitive sections. Also, as a result of this agreement the official name of the section for this XXII edition becomes the Nest Mediapro Studio Award.

Fourteen film students from Belgium, Colombia, India, Japan, Lithuania, Mexico, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Switzerland will gather from 25-29 September, five days on which to introduce and screen their works, attend workshops given by filmmakers and hold meetings with industry professionals. The chosen works encompass varying approaches and topics, fictions and non-fictions taking a personal look at the consequences of violence, the iconographies of the public space, political utopias, gender conventions and the processing of loss. A jury, made up of a renowned personality from the movie world and students from the selected schools, will give an award coming with 10,000 euros for the winner to one of the thirteen films directed by eleven men and three women directors.   

Since its creation in 2002, Nest, one of the most important sections of the San Sebastian Festival within its strategy of promoting new talents, has welcomed more than 1,000 young moviemakers and more than 370 selected short films, around a hundred masterclasses and conversations with film industry professionals including Céline Sciamma, Albertina Carri, Alexander Payne, Bertrand Bonello, Elena López Riera and Jean-Baptiste de Laubier. Considered to be the place where it all starts, Nest has shown the work of directors such as Raven Jackson, Kiro Russo, Oren Gerner, Isabel Lamberti, Léa Mysius, Jerónimo Quevedo, Laura Wandel and Grigory Kolomytsev, who have later gone one to premiere their works both in San Sebastian and at prestigious festivals in the international circuit.

During the students meeting, Tabakalera’s Medialab Studio will host a nonstop screening of all short films to have received awards in the history of the section. Free entry.