In 2022, the San Sebastian International Film Festival is celebrating its 70th anniversary, and all of the film programming institutions are joining in the celebration, including Nosferatu publications and cycles. The first volume to appear was in Spanish, entitled Zinemaldia 1953-2022. Singularities of the San Sebastian International Film Festival. Deciding on an editorial approach to this new event was no small task. How do you tackle seventy years? What type of book should be chosen? Neither a historical narrative nor a scrapbook fit with the spirit of the Nosferatu collection. We needed a more essay-like formula.
Quim Casas, who is coordinating this collective work and sits on the San Sebastian International Film Festival selection committee, found a three-pronged solution that, while likely incomplete, is at least stimulating. This is how he explains it in his “user guide:
“This book has neither the intention nor ability to be a summary, but rather a showcase of some of the singularities of a film competition understood to be a body that is always alert, changing, transformable, improvable, contradictory of course, but at the same time living and persisting up to the present. (...) It is a selection of moments, names, titles, and trends that we understand to be true, while we certainly accept that this is not the case for everyone. We have simply attempted to review its history based on what are generally considered to be some of its milestones: retrospectives that left a deep impression and rediscovered hidden or forgotten names, categories that gave the competition its personality, Golden Shells that may guide us through the various changes that film language has experienced since the Festival leapt onto the scene in 1953 (...)”.
