If there was a chill breeze at the 74th San Sebastián International Film Festival, held from 18th to 26th September, it wasn’t only the nearby ocean, but a whiff of nonspecific nostalgia: Of the Gerard Manley Hopkins kind you feel at turning points marking the passage of time. Fresh off its premiere at TIFF, Mike Leigh’s social worker story Tender Loving Care, which fittingly oozed some yearning for not-so-great-but-still-better old times, scored triple awards for Best Film, Best Screenplay, and a shared award for Best Lead Performance for Kate O’Flynn. It was announced as the final work of the UK director, whose faltering health didn’t allow him to attend the festival in person. While there is hope Leigh might make yet another feature, he’s not the only one saying goodbye.

After 16 years as artistic director, José Luis Rebordinos is handing the festival over to Maialen Beloki, San Sebastián’s first female director and part of what will hopefully become a new era where artistic direction isn’t defined as a position for old white academic men. Still, the predictable choice comes with mixed feelings for those hoping for a different breeze, one of fresh air, in the program. Strongly influenced by Toronto, the final days of which overlap with San Sebastián’s opening, the Basque contender seems on the brink of becoming a miniature version of TIFF. The latter still gets the premieres, more prestigious titles, more coverage, and more star guests, even though a growing number of celebrities are drawn to the small Spanish coastal town’s unpretentious atmosphere.

​Brad Pitt, Naomi Watts, Werner Herzog, Penélope Cruz, Jesse Eisenberg, Rami Malek, and Orlando Bloom had people queuing in front of the press conference room at the Kursaal festival hub and the red carpet to Victoria Eugenia Theater. The 110-year-old venue hosts most of the screenings from the competition, highlights of which included Tony Vahl’s historical horror story Krux, going empty-handed, and Amanda Kernell’s Brace Your Heart about a young Sami woman's struggle to continue her heritage, winning Best Director. Asta Kamma August won the other half of the shared Acting Award for playing a social outcast in Hans Petter Moland’s epic literature adaptation Growth of the Soil, shrouded in magnificent panorama pictures for which Oskar Dahlsbakken won Best Cinematography.

Ah Biao’s haunting social critique Border took the Special Jury Prize while Javier Cámara won Best Supporting Performance for the time travel grotesque 5 More Minutes. Tellingly, the audience award went to “Los Javis,” as Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi are bizarrely referred to by the tabloid press, for their soapy historical romance La Bola Negra. Meanwhile, Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham’s devastating documentary on Israel’s systematic mass-killing military operations, NAZA, only got the Audience Award for Best European Film. Both films already had their premiere screenings, at Cannes and Venice, reinforcing the festival’s seemingly eternal sophomore status. This includes overarching themes and talking points, inherited from prior festivals with a feeling of afterthoughts to the actual debate that already happened elsewhere.

San Sebastián’s confidence could easily drift into complacency unless its new direction is a literal one, toward a more daring selection and more diversity, also and especially in terms of class representation. Then the program directors would maybe know better than to lend a podium to Isabel Peña and Eduardo Villanueva’s thinly-disguised plea for the criminalization of sex work in their exploitation crime series The Castle. The crude six-part series premiering out of competition marked the low point of the 263 films from 47 countries. It served as an unpleasant reminder of the conservative climate at many leading film festivals. In contrast to these, at San Sebastián the progressive potential is still palpable—just like the risk of reactionism.

All award winners are named here.