‘Chevalier noir’, by Emad Aleebrahim Dehkordi, and ‘Something You Said Last Night’, by Luis De Filippis complete the New Directors section

Two first films, Chevalier noir / A Tale of Shemroon, from Emad Aleebrahim Dehkordi, and Something You Said Last Night, from Luis De Filippis, complete the New Directors section, whilst the short film Carta a mi madre para mi hijo / Letter to My Mother for My Son, directed by Carla Simón, will be the last film to enter Zabaltegi-Tabakalera. The number of feature films to participate in New Directors at San Sebastian Festival’s 70th edition therefore comes to 15 and the movies to participate in Zabaltegi-Tabakalera stand at 23.

Chevalier noir is the debut from Emad Aleebrahim Dehkordi (Tehran, 1979), who had previously directed the short films 1388-Undo (2010), Phill (1390) (2011), Lower Heaven (2017) and Cavalière (2020). The film narrates the story of two siblings and a city, Tehran, which swallows their own children.

The other debut film joining New Directors is Something You Said Last Night, by Luis De Filippis (Toronto, 1990), which will have its world premiere in the Discovery section of the Toronto Festival. The film follows the footsteps of a young trans woman who loses her job and goes on holiday with her Italian-Canadian family.

Lastly, Carla Simón (Barcelona, 1986) will participate out of competition in Zabaltegi-Tabakalera with Carta a mi madre para mi hijo, a short film conceived by the filmmaker as a partially fictitious and totally sincere homage to her family. Simón, who will premiere the same work in the Giornate degli Autori at the Venice Mostra, made her debut with Estiu 1993 / Summer 1993, which participated in Made in Spain, and this year also returns to the same section with Alcarràs (2022), with which she won the Golden Bear for Best Film at the last Berlin Festival.

NEW DIRECTORS

Chevalier Noir / A Tale of Shemroon

Emad Aleebrahim Dehkordi (Iran)

Country(ies) of production: France - Germany - Italy - Iran

Cast: Iman Sayad Borhani, Payar Allahyari, Masoumeh Beygi, Behzad Dorani, NIma Nouri Zadeh, Mehdi Ansari, Aisan Ghanbari

Shemroon, north of Tehran. Iman and his younger brother, Payar, live together with their father. After the death of their mother, Iman seeks for a way out of an uprooted life. Thanks to his connections with the gilded youth of the city, he starts a business to make some quick profit. What seems at first an opportunity for a new beginning turns into a twisted cycle affecting the family’s destiny.

Something You Said Last Nigh

tLuis De Filippis (Canada)

Country(ies) of production: Canada - Switzerland

Cast: Carmen Madonia, Ramona Milano, Paige Madison Evans, Joey Parro, Augustus Oicle, Xavier Woon A Tai, Carmelo Nelson

After being fired from her job, Ren, an aspiring writer and mid-twenty-something, accompanies her Canadian-Italian family on vacation. The realities of being a stunted millennial and a trans woman coalesce as Ren struggles to balance the yearning for independence with the comfort of being taken care of.

ZABALTEGI-TABAKALERA

Carta a mi madre para mi hijo / Letter to My Mother for My Son (Short film)

Carla Simón (Spain)

Country(ies) of production: Spain

Cast: Ángela Molina, Cecilia Gómez, Jesús Carmona, Carla Simón, Ainet Jounou, Anna Otin, Josep AbadNot in competition 

Carla is pregnant and naked, just like the snapshots showing the poses adopted by her mother while pregnant with Carla herself. The sunlight slips in through the windows. We see flashes in Super-8 of mothers and fathers, grandfathers and grandmothers; smiling, sewing, reciting poems. We then see a young girl growing up from the 60s until today, passing through the 80s, crossing the thresholds of womanhood and history, until she meets the pregnant Carla beside the blue sky of the Catalan coast.