SAN SEBASTIAN, SPAIN (May 9, 2024): Cate Blanchett, one of contemporary cinema’s leading actors, will receive a Donostia Award at the San Sebastian Festival’s 72nd edition as well as featuring on the official poster. The image of the poster is the work of graphic designer José Luis Lanzagorta based on a photograph by Gustavo Papaleo.
Over a career spanning more than three decades, Blanchett has racked up more than 200 acknowledgements and accolades, including two Academy Awards (and another six nominations), two Volpi Cups at the Venice Festival, four Baftas and four Golden Globes, an honorary César and Goya for lifetime achievement in a career combining cinéma d’auteur with crowd pleasers. The Australian actor and producer has worked with filmmakers including Martin Scorsese, Terrence Malick, Steven Soderbergh, Steven Spielberg, David Fincher, Ridley Scott, Sally Potter, Wes Anderson, Alfonso Cuarón, Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Woody Allen, Gillian Armstrong, Taika Waititi, Peter Jackson, Todd Haynes, Richard Linklater, Jim Jarmusch, Guillermo del Toro, Adam McKay and Todd Field.
While this will be Blanchett’s first visit to San Sebastian, the Festival has already screened a number of her films: Babel (Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Perlak, 2007) and Veronica Guerin (Joel Schumacher, Official Selection, 2003), competing for the Golden Shell.
Cate Blanchett is the second Australian actor to receive the Festival’s highest honorary award after Hugh Jackman (2013).
In 2018 the Festival revamped its posters to feature a figure from contemporary cinema. Isabelle Huppert, Penélope Cruz, Willem Dafoe, Sigourney Weaver, Juliette Binoche and Javier Bardem precede Blanchett as the official image, this year created by the graphic designer from San Sebastian, José Luis Lanzagorta, based on a portrait by the photographer Gustavo Papaleo.
Lanzagorta has also created the poster for the other sections. Joining photographer José Luis López de Zubiria, the pair have decided to combine illustration and photography. Thus, a moviemaker’s megaphone churns out paper ideas for New Directors; an ocean liner lets off cactus-shaped steam for Horizontes Latinos; a boxer fights an incandescent bulb filament for Zabaltegi-Tabakalera; a female swimmer dives for mother-of-pearl treasures in Perlak; a retro camera screens soap bubbles for Nest; a strawberry morphs into an adventure island for Culinary Zinema; and a lightening-root pays homage to the Basque artist Vicente Ameztoy for Zinemira. In addition, this year the poster of the Made in Spain section joins the others, coloured in indigo blue and featuring an astronaut who explores the planet in the shape of a carnation, a flower tying in with the Spanish cinema universe.
These posters are added to the three previously presented to illustrate the Klasikoak initiative, organised by the San Sebastian Film Festival and the Basque Film Archive, which brings together three existing proposals under the same brand: the spring cycle of the Basque Film Archive, the retrospective of the Festival (dedicated this year to Italian poliziesco) and the Klasikoak section.
Press Release Source: This press release was provided by the press department of San Sebastian International Film Festival (SSIFF), and has been published on the ZIZ website without any modifications, either in part or in full.
