SanSebastian

One Indian and one British productions to complete the New Directors section, where sixteen first and second films will compete for the Kutxabank-New Directors Award

The debuts of an Iranian director and a British filmmaker and the second feature from an Indian filmmaker join the New Directors section at the 65th edition of the San Sebastian Festival. Finally, sixteen films will compete for the Kutxabank-New Directors Award.

Coming from the field of Fine Arts, Daniel Kokotajlo (Manchester, UK), is a self-taught writer and director. He is the only filmmaker to have been selected twice for the iFeatures project development programme, with The Prefect in 2012 and Apostasy in 2015. His first feature film, Apostasy, follows a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses.
The world premiere of ‘Charmøren / The Charmer’ will open the New Directors section. Milad Alami (Teheran, 1982) was born in Iran, grew up in Sweden and now lives in Denmark. His short films have been selected for the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight and Clermont-Ferrand. The latest, Mommy (2015), won the Danish Academy for best short film. Charmøren /The Charmer, his first feature, stars a young Iranian desperately trying to meet women who can secure his stay in Denmark. 

Village Rockstars is the second feature from the film writer, producer and director Rima Das (Assam, India). She wrote and helmed the feature Man with the Binoculars: Antardrishti (2016), a contender at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival and participant in the Indian Story section of the Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival. Village Rockstars stars a 10 year-old girl desperate to own a guitar.

These three films join the list of thirteen productions already announced from Argentina, Belgium, Colombia, Chile, China, France, the Philippines, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Taiwan, and will compete for the New Directors-Kutxabank Award. The accolade, to be decided by an international jury, comes with 50,000 euros for the director and distributor of the film in Spain. The films in this section are also candidates for the EROSKI Youth Award, voted by a jury of a maximum of 300 students between the ages of 18 and 25 years.