The 19th edition of Nest, the San Sebastian Festival’s international competition for short films by film students, has selected 13 short films from among the 348 submissions received. The submissions came from 165 schools in 49 countries.
The chosen works, which included seven created by male filmmakers and six by female filmmakers, come from schools in Argentina, Cuba, Germany, India, Spain, the UK, and the US.
Organised by the San Sebastian Festival and Tabakalera International Centre for Contemporary Culture, this section aims to shed light on the works of students at film schools across the world. This year, the short film competition will maintain its usual format of physical attendance, with screenings on 21-23 September.
For the second consecutive year, Nest will include a short film presented by the Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola (EQZE), the school promoted by the Provincial Council of Gipuzkoa with the festival’s backing.
is the film, entitled Ella i jo, is directed by 22-year-old Jaume Claret Muxart, who completed the post-graduate Filmmaking Studies course at EQZE in San Sebastian.
A renowned personality from the world of film will chair the jury which, exceptionally this year, will be made up of three winning students from previous editions. The jury will decide the winner of the Nest Best Short Film Award, sponsored by Orona Fundazioa, from among the thirteen works presented. This accolade, going to the director of the chosen project, comes with €10,000.
Year after year, Nest gains consolidation as a breeding ground for new talent, and is therefore one of the Festival’s most relevant sections.
At this edition the New Directors section will host the premiere of La última primavera (“Last Days of Spring”), the feature film debut from German-born filmmaker Isabel Lamberti, who was raised in Spain and the Netherlands, and who won the Nest Torino Award in 2015.
New directors will also include Chupacabra by Russian filmmaker Grigory Kolomytsev, who participated at Nest in 2016 and 2018. Kolomytsev was also a participant in the Ikusmira Berriak residencies in 2018. Last year, it was the filmmaker Oren Gerner who competed in New Directors with Africa, five years after his success at Nest with Greenland, his graduation film.
On the other hand, similar to earlier editions, Tabakalera will take advantage of the Festival dates to screen, in loop format, the short films that won Nest section awards in recent years. The works can be watched on the screen set up in the Medialab, the Tabakalera service housing both the creation library and the digital culture and technology laboratory. All of the short films to have participated in the section are digitised and archived at the Medialab, where they are available for consultation by all library users.
The San Sebastian Festival and Tabakalera organise the Nest section, part of the legacy of San Sebastian, European Capital of Culture in 2016.
