‘Spirit of the Beehive’ Spanish Master Victor Erice to Receive a San Sebastian Donostia Award

Christina Ricci is not thrilled with Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis – whatsoever.

Welcome to the 19th installment of Deadline’s Strike Talk podcast. It is a task Oscar-nominated filmmaker Billy Ray took on at the beginning of the Writers Guild strike against AMPTP, and who knew he would be engaged in it longer than it would have taken him to shoot a picture.

John Hopewell Chief International Correspondent Javier Bardem, winner of a San Sebastian 2023 Donostia Award for career achievement, is putting back his on-stage acceptance of the distinction until the 2024 San Sebastian Film Festival. The postponement is due to the “limits imposed under the strike called by the U.S. Actors Union (SAG-AFTRA),” the San Sebastian Festival announced Friday.

Christopher Vourlias When U.K. writer-director Jonathan Glazer approached Polish cinematographer Łukasz Żal about “The Zone of Interest,” a provocative Holocaust drama adapted from a 2014 novel by Martin Amis, he had a bold proposition for the film, which centers on the domestic life of an Auschwitz commandant and his family living in the shadow of the notorious concentration camp. What if, Glazer suggested, they shoot the scenes inside the Höss family home without a single camera on set? Working on location, production designer Chris Oddy and his crew built a replica of the camp commandant’s real-life house.

Holly Jones Ahead of its world premiere at this year’s San Sebastian Horizontes Latinos strand, Buenos Aires-based production house Historias Cinematográficas has shared with Variety an exclusive first look at the trailer for Lucía Puenzo’s energetic new film “Los Impactados,” with Variety. Produced by Historias Cinematográficas, the Puenzo family production house led by Academy Award winner Luis Puenzo (“The Official Story,” “Old Gringo”), in association with Exile Content Studio and Non Stop Studios, the project is co-produced by Juan de Dios and Pablo Larraín’s indie outfit Fábula, and turning on a study of rebirth after severe trauma. Written by Puenzo and Lorena Ventimiglia, the singular narrative follows Ada, played by Mariana Di Girolamo who starred opposite Gael Garcia Bernal in Pablo Larraín’s “Ema,” after she’s struck by lightning and on through to her intriguing metamorphosis alongside an enigmatic and experimental doctor, played by “El Último Hereje” lead Germán Palacios, and a group of fellow survivors who find themselves increasingly drawn to electric current.

Diana Ross graced the stage, announcing, “Hello, L.A.!”Ross mesmerized the audience with her hit “Love Hangover” and then led SoFi Stadium in singing “Happy Birthday” to the birthday queen herself. Beyoncé, visibly moved, rushed to the stage to greet Diana Ross with tears welling up in her eyes, and the two iconic divas shared a touching moment.

Vicky Krieps, the star of Viggo Mortensen’s western The Don’t Dead Hurt and Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Phantom Thread, will be bestowed with the TIFF Tribute Performer Award at the fifth annual Awards gala on Sunday, Sept. 10, at Fairmont Royal York Hotel.

John Hopewell Chief International Correspondent CAA Media Finance’s Roeg Sutherland, Goodfellas’ Vincent Maraval and Cinetic Media’s John Sloss look set to attend the San Sebastian Festival’s second Creative Investors’ Conference, co-organised once again with CAA Media Finance. Bringing to San Sebastian the biggest bevy of high-powered U.S. execs and industry movers-and-shakers to attend the Spanish Festival, further CIC attendees include Netflix’s Teresa Moneo, Amblin Partners’ Jeb Brody and Anonymous Content’s David Davoli as well as K&S’s Matías Mosteirín and Infinity Hill’s Axel Kuschevatzky, as the Conference opens up to Latin America.

John Hopewell Chief International Correspondent Mexico’s Teresa Sánchez, winner of a 2022 Sundance World Cinema Dramatic Special Jury Award for acting in Juan Pablo González’s “Dos Estaciones,” is set to star in the follow-up, his sophomore outing “Warm Water.” Co-directed with Ana Isabel Fernández, co-writer of “Dos Estaciones,” “Warm Water” will also star Rafaela Fuentes, who played opposite Sánchez in “Dos Estaciones.” Set up at Mexico’s Sin Sitio Cine, whose partners are González, Ilana Coleman, Makena Buchanan and Jamie Gonçalves, “Warm Water,” produced by Bruna Haddad (“La Hija de Todas Las Rabias,” “Dos Estaciones”) and Gonçalves, will be brought onto the market at the San Sebastian Europe-Latin American Co-Production Forum, where it ranks as one of its highest-profile projects. In development and scheduled to shoot in fall 2024, “Warm Water” turns on Ana María, a renowned actress who, after a devastating break-up, reluctantly travels to the rural countryside in Mexico to lead an acting workshop.

Rachel Leviss has responded to her candid three-part interview about “Scandoval” with Bethenny Frankel for the first time since the first episode was released nearly two weeks ago.

Marta Balaga Paula Hernández’s “A Ravaging Wind” (“El viento que arrasa”) has debuted a poster and trailer ahead of its premieres at Toronto and San Sebastian. Based on the novel by Selva Almada – and written by Hernández and Leonel D’Agostino – “A Ravishing Wind” will play Toronto’s Centrepiece program, before opening San Sebastian’s Horizontes Latinos, a showcase of many of the best Latin American movies of the last year. It sees Alfredo Castro as Reverend Pearson, an evangelical pastor who travels Argentina by car in the 1990s with his daughter Leni (Almudena González, seen in “Argentina, 1985”).

John Hopewell Chief International Correspondent Headlined respectively by “Sound of Metal” lead Riz Ahmed and “Matrix” stars Jessica Henwick and Hugo Weaving, Christos Nikou’s “Fingernails” and Kitty Green’s “The Royal Hotel” figure among seven newly unveiled films which will play in main competition at September’s San Sebastian Film Festival. Also in the running are buzz titles “A Journey in Spring,” from Taiwan’s Peng Tzu-Hui, Wang Ping-Wen, and “Kalak,” directed by Denmark’s Isabella Eklöf.

Aussie filmmaker Kitty Green’s latest pic, The Royal Hotel, starring Julia Garner, and Fingernails, the latest film from Christos Nikou, with Riz Ahmed and Jessie Buckley, have been added to San Sebastian’s competition lineup.

Peter Caranicas Deputy Editor The Camerimage Film Festival, which focuses on the art of cinematography, will honor director Werner Herzog (“Fitzcarraldo”), along with his collaborator, Peter Zeitlinger (“Losses to be Expected”), with its Cinematographer-Director Duo Award. The accolade spotlights collaboration between helmers and their DPs, and both creators will be on hand to receive the trophy at Camerimage, which will celebrate its 31st edition in Torun, Poland, on Nov.

David Ayer is furious about a fast one Hollywood has apparently pulled.

San Sebastian Fetes Veteran Director Victor Erice

UK director James Marsh’s literary biopic Dance First, starring Gabriel Byrne as iconic Irish writer Samuel Beckett, will close the 71st San Sebastian Film Festival.

John Hopewell Chief International Correspondent “Dance First,” a portrait of Irish writer Samuel Beckett starring Gabriel Byrne and directed by Oscar winner James Marsh, will close this year’s San Sebastian Film Festival, playing out of competition. Byrne, a memorable lead in “The Usual Suspects” and “Miller’s Crossing” who also won a Golden Globe for his performance in “In Treatment,” plays Samuel Beckett, driving into his deep contradictions and inner torment of a writer who was a Parisian bon vivant, a WWII Resistance fighter and then Nobel Prize-winning playwright who, however, became a recluse, living the last years of his life in a single room in a nursing home, ashamed of past actions and convinced that for much of his life he had been a failure.

John Hopewell Chief International Correspondent Mexico’s El Relicario, whose “El rostro cubierto de besos” screened at Cannes Critics’ Week in its 2023 Morelia showcase, has boarded Ximena Valdivia’s Malaga Festival winner “4Eber,” a movie melding the modern teen dance scene in Cusco and ancient and contemporary fantasy and mythology. Written by Valdivia and Costa Rica’s Luisa Mora Fernández, a co-scribe on Mexican Kim Torres’ Cannes Festival-selected short “Luz Nocturna,” “4Eber” is now produced by Valdivia’s and El Relicario’s Mariano Rentería and Jorge Diez, in the first international feature co-production outing for the Morelia-based outfit.

John Hopewell Chief International Correspondent Alfredo Castro, an absolute lead or co-star in seven Pablo Larraín films and one of the highest-regarded of actors in Latin America, is set to head the choral cast of “Three Dark Nights” (“Tres noches negras”), the third feature from Spanish-Chilean Theo Court. “Three Dark Nights” follows up Court’s “White on White,” also starring Castro, an actor described by Variety as “reliably superb,” which won a best director and Fipresci Prize at 2019’s Venice Horizons.