San Sebastian Fest announced inauguration and clossing films
The world premiere of the film Geister / Ghost Song will open the competitive Official Selection of the San Sebastián Festival’s 74th edition. The film directed by Fatih Akin (Hamburg, 1973) will screen on 18 September at the Kursaal following the opening ceremony.
Akin will compete for the Golden Shell for the first time with a full-length film featuring Mariam Dawoud and Eren M. Güvercin on the cast. The young actors play Farasha and Faris, who meet at a graduation party and fall in love at first sight. When Farasha suddenly dies that same night, an extraordinary love story unfolds between two worlds, as she finds a way to meet Faris in his dreams.
Fatih Akin is one of the best-known German filmmakers on the international scene. He achieved world renown with Head-On (2004), recipient of the Golden Bear at the Berlinale. He later won the Best Screenplay Award at the Cannes Festival for The Edge of Heaven (2007) and the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Festival for Soul Kitchen (2009).
The Belgian filmmaker Michaël R. Roskam (Sint-Truiden, 1972) will return to the San Sebastián Festival to close the Official Selection of the 74th edition out of competition with Le Faux Soir, which will have its European premiere following its screening in Toronto. Roskam who, with The Drop (2014) won the Jury Prize for Best Screenplay, now recreates one of the most curious episodes of the Belgian Resistance movement during the 2nd World War, a clandestine operation that turned the press into a weapon against the nazi occupiers.
Based on the book Le "faux" Soir, 9 novembre 1943, by Marie Istas, the cast of the film boasts Arieh Worthalter, Mélanie Thierry, Karim Leklou, Mara Taquin, Bouli Lanners, Julien Frison and François Damiens, among other actors. The story is set in 1943, when, having occupied Belgium, the nazis turn the national newspaper Le Soir into their propaganda tool. To raise the spirits of the Belgian people, a group of Resistance fighters comes up with a wild idea, to print a fake edition of the newspaper mocking the occupier in what some historians consider to be the first ever media hack.
