The San Sebastian International Film Festival has added an animated animated feature from Japan, an autobiographical documentary from the late Spanish director Bigas Luna (Jamon, Jamon) and a Canadian production starring Anne Hathaway described as Godzilla meets Lost in Translation to complete its official 2016 lineup.
The three movies — Makoto Shinkai’s Your Name, the doc Bigas x Bigas and Hathaway-starrer Colossal from Spanish director Nacho Vigalondo — bring to 25 the number of titles in San Sebastian’s Official Selection. Seventeen of those are in competition for the Golden Shell for Best Picture, the festival’s top prize.
The Spanish A-list festival will have a special screening of Shinkai’s Your Name, an animated feature about a young boy and girl who awake one day to find they have swapped bodies.
The documentary Bigas x Bigas was compiled from more than 500 reels of video, pictorial texts and audio files of family scenes and chats with friends and colleagues by Luna and Santiago Garrido Rua before Luna died in 2013. The late filmmaker is best known for his comedies Jamon, Jamon (1992) and Golden Balls (1993).
But the prize for strangest plot device at this year’s festival could go to Colossal. The drama, which will premiere at the Toronto Film Festival next month, sees Hathaway playing a going-nowhere party girl who discovers a mysterious connection between her own personal break-down and, on the other side of the world, a giant lizard that is laying waste to the city of Tokyo.
The 64th San Sebastian festival runs Sept. 16-24.
