Ambition and transition grace the 74th San Sebastián International Film Festival, kicking off today with a distinct programme marking both the aspirations and arrears of the coastal cinematic event. Just a year short of its big anniversary, the Zinemaldia, as the SSIFF is endearingly called in its hometown, sees a pivotal moment of change. After 15 years as artistic director, José Luis Rebordinos passes the staff on to longtime deputy director Maialen Beloki. A growing guest list of international stars bolsters the festival’s increasing importance and influence despite its struggle in the continuous competition for prestigious world premieres. It’s a crucial edition, the tensions and synergies of which reflect in the lineup.

Its opening film is Fatih Akin’s supernatural romance Geister (Ghost Song), about a young love cut short by tragedy and granted a transitional time that will either reunite or part the protagonists forever. Mike Leigh returns with Tender Loving Care, chronicling the tumultuous lives of two London social workers in what might be his last feature. Another regular, Pablo Larraín, presents his eighth film at the festival and his first in competition, the three-hour-long My Sad Dead. Marion Cotillard and Théodore Pellerin star in Nicole Garcia’s Milo as an ex-convict and her son unaware of her identity. Julianne Moore plays a housewife turned passionate method actress in  Jesse Eisenberg’s third directorial effort The Debut.

Hans Petter Moland presents his adaptation of Knut Hamsun’s Nobel Prize-winning novel of the same name, Growth of the Soil, while Amanda Kernell observes a young Sami woman’s struggle to continue her family legacy as reindeer herders in Brace Your Heart. A handful of debuts among the 17 competition entries underline the selection's prominence as a platform for new talents. It’s a quality actively supported by Beloki during her 17 years as an influential advisor in the festival team. The first woman appointed as head of SSIFF could increase the internationality and diversity of the event, which grew into the most important showcase for Spanish and Latin American cinema during Rebordinos’s 15-year tenure.

Diego Luna brings his drama Ashes, about a migrant woman’s fight for acceptance and autonomy, to the Horizontes Latinos section. After their surprisingly successful Cannes premiere, Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi enter with their historical melodrama The Black Ball alongsideManuela Martelli‘s superior take on the lasting trauma of dictatorship, The Meltdown. There is more star power than ever with Brad Pitt expected to attend the out-of-competition screening of David Ayer’s Heart of the Beast. Werner Herzog and Naomi Watts come to receive their Donostia Awards. Orlando Bloom is already in town for Herzog’s magical realist fable Bucking Fastard, and Rami Malek is due for  Ira Sachs’ character portrait The Man I Love.

At a time when top-tier festivals like Venice face a decrease in star attendance, smaller festivals have less obtrusive fan crowds, fewer influencers, and a more cinephile audience. Seemingly absent are challenging political issues. There are the ubiquitous festival film themes of shifting identity, migration, unstable memory, and the all-time classics: historical and intergenerational trauma. Even the historical programming looks back at these very same points with a restored print of The Disenchantment, the withdrawal of which after the death of a protester, Josu Zabala, caused a scandal 50 years ago. It’s a poignant reminder that cinema should invite debates on the screen and among the viewers, rather than foster artistic apathy.

Critically engaging with its past would be essential for San Sebastián to avoid the mistakes of its canonical competitors on the festival circuit. Across 263 titles from 47 countries, the change in artistic direction adds a paradigmatic layer to the lineup’s questions of independence and self-assertion: between tradition and renewal, local and international filmmaking, commercial stability and cinematic quality, politics and popcorn. It’s up to the next ten days to show if the proximity to Toronto and Venice, both in terms of programming, timing, and guest list, will prove a successful challenge or self-appointed limitation.