The San Sebastián Festival will award its Donostia Award to producer Esther García

Just four decades after the creation of The Desire, of which she is a producer, Esther García will be recognized with the Donostia award at the 73rd edition of the San Sebastian International Film Festival.

Key figure in the internationalization of Spanish and Latin American cinema, Esther García (Cedillo de la Torre, Segovia, 1956) has worked on more than a hundred productions. In 1986 she joined the production company El Deseo, created a year earlier by the brothers Pedro and Agustín Almodóvar, but before that she had participated as secretary, assistant or production manager in films such as Pim, pam, pum… ¡Fuego! (Pedro Olea, 1975), who competed in the Official Section of San Sebastián; Seven dangerous girls (Peter Lazaga, 1979), Be unfaithful and don't look with who (Fernando Trueba, 1985), The year of lights (Fernando Trueba, 1986), The joyful life (Fernando Colomo, 1987) The most fun game (Emilio Martínez Lázaro, 1988). He also collaborated in series such as Curro Jimenez, which featured directors such as Mario Camus, Pilar Miró and the Romero Marchent brothers, and The mansions of Ulloa (Gonzalo Suárez), in addition to much of the work of Mariano Ozores.

But from his first collaboration with Pedro Almodóvar in the movie Matador (1986) has been a fundamental piece in all the subsequent projects of the director from La Mancha, who also received the Donostia Award in the last edition of the San Sebastián Festival. His name appears associated with that of the Almodóvars in films such as The law of desire (1987), which gave its name to the production company, or Women on the verge of a nervous breakdown (1988), which was nominated for the Oscar for best foreign film; an award that he achieved a decade later with All about my mother (1999). In addition to The flower of my secret (1995), screened in the Official Section of San Sebastián out of competition, other titles in common are talk to her (2002), which gave Pedro Almodóvar the Oscar for best original screenplay; bad education (2004), which opened Cannes; and Return (2006), which won the awards for best script and best female performance for the entire cast at the French festival before winning nearly a hundred awards, including the FIPRESCI in San Sebastián.

They returned to Cannes with The broken hugs (2009), The skin I live in (2011), Juliet (2016) y pain and glory (2019), with which Antonio Banderas won the Best Actor Award. Penélope Cruz won the award for best actress with Parallel mothers (2021) in Venice, where The next room (2024) won the Golden Lion, the Italian festival's highest award. After this film, which was the Donostia Award Screening scheduled after the gala dedicated last year to Almodóvar, there will come bitter christmas, currently in development and which will be the twentieth feature film produced by Esther García for Pedro Almodóvar. He has also produced his short films The human voice (2020) y strange way of life (2023).

Desire has always been characterized by give opportunity to emerging filmmakers such as Álex de la Iglesia, Isabel Coixet, Daniel Calparsoro, Mónica Laguna, Dunia Ayaso and Félix Sabroso or Belén Macías. In addition, it has also supported the careers of important names in Ibero-American cinema such as Guillermo del Toro, Lucrecia Martel, Damián Szifron, Pablo Trapero, Julia Solomonoff, Luis Ortega, Andrés Wood and Miguel Gonçalves Mendes. Among his latest productions, Sirāt (2025) stands out, with which Oliver Laxe won the Jury Prize at Cannes.

Among the numerous awards García's achievements include the National Cinematography Award, collected in San Sebastián in 2018, the Fotogramas de Plata 2019 and six Goya Awards: three as production director for Mutant action (Álex de la Iglesia, 1993), All about my mother (Pedro Almodóvar, 1999) and The secret life of words (Isabel Coixet, 2005), and three as a producer for Return (Pedro Almodóvar, 2006), wild tales (Damián Szifron, 2014) and pain and glory (Pedro Almodóvar, 2019).

He has also stood out for his feminist commitment: She is a member of CIMA (Association of Women Filmmakers and Audiovisual Media), she promoted the collective documentary together with a large group of Spanish filmmakers I decide. The freedom train (Made in Spain, 2014) and produced, among others, non-fiction such as With a broken leg (Made in Spain, 2013) y Send eggs (Official Section Special Screenings, 2016), both directed by Diego Galán, or The silence of others (2018), by Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar.

Marisa Paredes, image of the festival

For the eighth consecutive year, a great figure of contemporary cinematography stars in a poster that since 2018 has been dominated by the portraits of Isabelle Huppert, Penélope Cruz, Willem Dafoe, Sigourney Weaver, Juliette Binoche, Javier Bardem and Cate Blanchett. This year's poster with the image of Marisa Paredes has been designed by the San Sebastian studio Wallijai based on a snapshot taken by photographer Manuel Outumuro in Madrid in 2000.

Wallijai has also made the posters for the rest of the sections, which, as usual, mix photography and illustration, and this time they play with the idea that we all carry different films inside us. Likewise, each poster includes more or less express references to different genres: drama (New Directors), war films (Horizontes Latinos), romantic and musical films (Zabaltegi-Tabakalera), science fiction (Perlak), anime (Nest), horror (Culinary Zinema), adventure stories (Zinemira) and westerns (Made in Spain).

These posters will soon be joined by the three from the Klasikoak initiative, which from 2024 groups three proposals under the same brand: the Klasikoak retrospective, which this year will be dedicated to the American screenwriter Lillian Hellman; the Klasikoak section of the Festival, and the Basque Film Library cycle that takes place between October and December in Bilbao, Donostia, Pamplona, ​​San Juan de Luz and Vitoria.

Endowed with a singular elegance and stage presence, Marisa Paredes (Madrid, 1946-2024) worked in more than 75 feature films during a career full of complex characters and great dramatic force. His career is associated with directors such as Fernando Trueba, Montxo Armendáriz, Jaime Chávarri, Agustí Villaronga and, above all, Pedro Almodóvar, for whom he worked in between darkness (1983), Far Heels (1991), The flower of my secret (1995), All about my mother (1999), talk to her (2002) y The skin I live in (2011). Outside the Spanish sphere, Paredes also acted under the orders of filmmakers such as the Mexicans Arturo Ripstein and Guillermo del Toro, the Chilean Raúl Ruiz, the Italian Roberto Benigni and the Portuguese Manoel de Oliveira.

Therefore, as the festival director, José Luis Rebordinos, has pointed out, it will be the second time that Marisa Paredes stars on the poster. “In 2006 it was represented as La dama de Shanghai and now, 19 years later, in a beautiful image that reminds us of her greatness as an actress and as a person. And all this in an edition in which one of the Donostia Awards will go to an equally talented and brave woman with whom Marisa worked on several occasions, Esther García, a producer without whom Spanish and Latin American cinema of the last 40 years cannot be understood. For both reasons, for this poster and for this award, we could not be happier today.”