Colombian director Juan Sebastián Mesa and Salvadoran filmmaker Tatiana Huezo led a wide spread of industry honours at the festival's Co-Production Forum, with prizes also going to first-time directors from Kosovo, Argentina and Portugal.
Juan Sebastián Mesa walked away from San Sebastián's industry night with the WIP LATAM Industry Award for his project Lovers Go Home!, a Colombia-Canada co-production about a webcam performer in Medellín and a disabled war veteran in New Jersey who fall into an online relationship that turns real. Mesa, whose 2016 debut Los nadie won an audience award at Venice Critics' Week, first brought this project to San Sebastián's Co-Production Forum back in 2022. It's taken four years to get this far.
Tatiana Huezo took the other big Latin American prize, the EGEDA Platino Industria Award, for Galerna, a Mexico-set drama about two casting directors scouting non-professional actors for a science-fiction film in remote farming country. Huezo has built a reputation few directors from the region can match, moving between documentary and fiction with a Cannes Un Certain Regard special mention for Prayers for the Stolen and a Berlin Encounters directing win last year for The Echo. Galerna brings together production houses Pimienta Films and Elastica, the team also behind Alcarràs.
Both wins point to how San Sebastián has quietly become, alongside Cannes, the place where Latin American cinema gets financed and sold, not just screened.
A crowded field beyond the two headliners
The festival's Europe-Latin America Co-Production Forum spread its awards thin this year. Argentine and Chilean project The Amateurs, from Felipe Solari Yrigoyen, took the Best Project Award, a heist comedy set at a convention of movie-character cosplayers where a Maltese Falcon statuette goes missing. Solari described it as a story about how ordinary people far from Hollywood get pulled into events beyond their control.
Ingrid Pokropek's The Illusions, an Argentina-Spain fantasy about three strangers whose wishes on a shooting star get scrambled, picked up the Dale! Award. Kosovo-Montenegro drama In a Manner of Speaking, from first-time director Val Jashari, won the WIP Europa Industry Award. Mexican filmmaker Selma Cervantes, whose short Sweatshop Girl starred Yalitza Aparicio, took the Artekino International Prize for her feature debut Mourning Sound.
Spain's own development programme, Ikusmira Berriak, handed its Tanta Award to Basque director Ekain Albite for Akira, a road movie following a Georgian scrap dealer through the Basque coast, and a third prize to Portuguese filmmaker Inês Nunes for The Spirit Healer Is Away for the Weekend. Albite told Variety his films come out of "spending time with people and places, allowing fiction to emerge from those encounters."
None of these projects have shoot dates locked beyond Pokropek's, which is eyeing a fall 2027 start. For the rest, San Sebastián's win is a financing push, not a release date. What happens next depends on how fast these sales agents and co-producers can turn festival buzz into actual budgets.
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