The Valladolid International Film Festival, Seminci, will take place for the 69th time this fall, running Oct. 18-26.
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To prepare, we’ve scanned the festival’s catalog for ten standout titles that attendees won’t want to miss at this year’s event. Below, we explain why each is a must-see proposition at this year’s Semicni.
“They Will Be Dust,” Carlos Marques-Marcet (Spain)
Opening this year’s festival is Carlos Marques-Marcet’s Toronto Platform winner, “They Will Be Dust.” In this tragicomic musical, a woman diagnosed with a terminal illness decides to go to Switzerland to end her life, accompanied by her partner of 40 years, Flavio. Seminci organizers praise the film as “an unexpected celebration of life itself and of the unconditional love of those who accompany us along the way.”
“Vermiglio,” Maura Delpero (Italy, France, Belgium)
Italy’s submission to the upcoming International Feature Oscar race, Maura Delpero’s intimate epic “Vermiglio,” which took the Venice Film Festival’s Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize, is set in a village in the Italian Alps at the end of WWII, where the arrival of a soldier causes a stir between three sisters. After debuting in Venice, the film screened in Toronto. Seminci marks its Spanish debut.
“Stranger Eyes,” Yeo Siew Hua (Singapur, Taiwan, France, U.S.)
Another Venice standout, “Stranger Eyes” kicks off three months after their two-year-old daughter disappeared, a couple receives an unmarked DVD in their mailbox, which includes footage of them going about their daily routines. The intimate mystery unspools into a much larger narrative about the state of modern-day surveillance. Variety’s Guy Lodge called it a “moving, moody reflection on social isolation and alienation.”
“The Most Precious of Cargoes,” Michel Hazanavicius (France, Belgium)
Adapted from Jean-Claude Grumberg’s novel of the same name and featuring a graphic novel aesthetic, “The Most Precious of Cargoes” is a rarity in Seminci’s main competition, an animated feature. In his Variety review, Peter Debruge characterized “Cargoes” as “an anomaly (the first animated feature to compete for the Palme d’Or since “Persepolis” in 2007) and the most likely to become a classic” among all the films that premiered at this year’s Cannes.
“Black Dog,” Guan Hu (China)
Winner of the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival, “Black Dog” is the story of an ex-con who returns to his now abandoned hometown before embarking on an epic motorcycle adventure across the Gobi Desert with a potentially rabid black dog. A “magnificently shot, moody and moving fable,” according to Jessica Kiang’s Variety review from Cannes.
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“The Drunkmen’s Marseillaise,” Pablo Gil Rituerto (Spain, France, Italy)
A Seminci world premiere. In this debut feature documentary, a film crew travels across northern Spain, following in the footsteps of the clandestine journey undertaken by the Cantacronache music group who, in the summer of 1961, collected popular songs of resistance. Through the parallel journeys, the emotional and political geography of a territory where wounds of the past remain open is slowly revealed.
“The Wailing,” Pedro Martín-Calero (Spain, Argentina, France)
This trans-Atlantic thriller, a San Sebastian world premiere that received rave reviews from the international press, is a likely candidate to join Spain’s canon of unforgettable horror movies. In the film, three young women separated by decades and thousands of miles are terrorized by the same ethereal threat that nobody, not even them, can properly see. But they all hear a skin-tingling wailing in its presence.
“The New Years,” Rodrigo Sorogoyen, Sara Cano, Paula Fabra (Spain)
Following on “The Beasts,” a 2023 French Cesar Best Foreign Film winner, the latest from Sorgoyen, a Movistar Plus+ original teaming with Arte France. A 10-part series, or two-part 449-minute movie, Sorogoyen insists, it catches Ana and Oscar on their meet-cute on New Year’s Eve 2015, and catches up with them on the same day for every year of the next decade. Varying tone in episodes from romantic comedy to family drama to near horror nightmare, “it starts about a couple, ends up about life,” says Sorogoyen. Bidding fair to become one of the most talked about Spanish series – or films – of the year.
“Salve Maria,” Mar Coll (Spain)
World premiering at Locarno, “Salve Maria” weighs in as a career departure for Coll, a genre-bending psychological thriller, which, however, Coll, an inveterate iconoclast, tables a taboo: Whether all women are cut out for motherhood. Certainly not Maria, a promising novelist and new mother, who is increasingly haunted by the threat of a monster: Herself, and her fears of committing infanticide. Energized by a pulsating orchestral score by Zeltia Montes, an unsettling film which takes Maria to the High Pyrenees as she tries to understand her feelings which, Coll suggests are outside our moral compass but much more common than imagined.
“La Guitarra Flemenca de Yerai Cortés,” Antón Álvarez (Spain)
An auspicious doc debut for Álvarez, better known via his stage name singer-songwriter C. Tangana, who co-wrote Rosalía’s “Antes de Morirme” before achieving worldwide fame with “El Madrileño.” Winning a Special Mention at San Sebastian’s New Directors strand, the film has Cortés, the rising star on Spain’s flamenco scene, has spectacular set-pieces, such as Cortés strumming bulerias in Alicante’s Plaza Argel, where he grew up, accompanied by family and friends. But it’s the touchingly tragic family story which Cortés wants to tell with his music, and Álvarez’s narrative chops in telling it, which really marks the first feature apart.
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