Hiroshi Teshigahara Retrospective at San Sebastian Film Festival 2023: Celebrating a Visionary Japanese Director

The upcoming San Sebastian Film Festival (September 22-30) will feature a retrospective dedicated to the renowned Japanese director Hiroshi Teshigahara (1927-2001). The special selection of classic films has been organized in collaboration with the Basque Film Archive, Japan Foundation, and Etxepare Basque Institute as part of the Euskadi-Japan 2023 program.

Hiroshi Teshigahara is recognized as one of the essential directors of Japanese cinema in the 1960s. His experimental approach and long collaboration with writer Kobo Abe earned him a great reputation in the film industry. One of his most acclaimed films, and the only one distributed in Spain, "Suna no onna / Woman in the Dunes" (Woman in the Dunes, 1964), perfectly reflects the era and distinctive style of the Japanese author.

The retrospective of Hiroshi Teshigahara at the 2023 San Sebastian Festival will allow attendees to discover the complete filmography of this relatively unknown director. Additionally, it will be complemented by the publication of the interview book "Avant-garde chronicles. Conversations with Hiroshi Teshigahara," written by Inuhiko Yomota and translated from Japanese by Daniel Aguilar.

Although Teshigahara had limited international impact compared to other Japanese New Wave filmmakers, his talent was recognized with awards at festivals such as Cannes (where he received the Special Jury Prize for "Woman in the Dunes") and two nominations for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film (now Best International Feature Film) and Best Director for the same film. Apart from his film career, Teshigahara was also a master of the traditional Japanese art of flower arrangement known as ikebana.

Born and deceased in Tokyo, Teshigahara began his career in fine arts before venturing into documentary filmmaking and later fiction feature films. His collaboration with Kobo Abe was particularly fruitful, working together on scripts and novel adaptations that resulted in masterpieces such as "Woman in the Dunes," "Tanin no kao / The Face of Another" (The Face of Another, 1966), and "Moetsukita chizu / The Man Without a Map" (The Man Without a Map, 1968). These films are considered pivotal in the director's filmography, reflecting his conceptual agitation and exploration of new themes and narrative forms.

On another note, it has been announced that the retrospective of the 2024 edition of the festival will be dedicated to Italian crime films, under the title "Italia violenta. El cine policíaco italiano" (Violent Italy: Italian Crime Cinema). This cycle will include a selection of genre films that reflect the political and social evolution of Italy from the 1950s to the present day. Italian crime cinema has been recognized for its ability to portray the reality of the country and continues to be the subject of review and analysis from a contemporary perspective.

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