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Alain Guiraudie’s “Misericordia,” Carlos Marqués-Marcet “They Will be Dust” and Yeo Siew Hua’s “Stranger Eyes” all won big at Spain’s auteurist haven Valladolid Film Festival on Saturday, in a second edition under José Luis Cienfuegos whose prizes served as a vindication of the changes he has wrought at the festival as well as an indication of some ways European arthouse is going.

All three directors’ awards build on prior upbeat reception. Playing Cannes Premiere, “Misericordia,” which scooped Valladolid’s best picture Golden Spike and its screenplay trophy, was hailed by Variety as a “darkly comic backwoods fable of pansexual desire and small-town sociopathy” which marks a “welcome re-embrace of the streamlined murdery perversities of his terrific ‘Stranger by the Lake.'”

The Valladolid jury, made up of Greek director Sofia Exarchou, Spanish actress Aida Folch, critic and editor Devika Girish, German producer Ingmar Trost and Spanish director and writer Luis López Carrasco,...

Ken Loach’s ‘The Old Oak’ takes Spanish festival’s audience prize.

The 68th edition of the Valladolid International Film Week, also known as Seminci, wrapped on Saturday (October 28), giving its top award, the Golden Spike, to Laura Ferrés’ debut feature The Permanent Picture.

It is the first time the best feature award at the long-running film festival has been won by a Spanish woman director.

Ferrés previously directed short film The Disinherited which won the Cannes Discovery Award for best short in 2017.

See below for full list of winners

The Permanent Picture is the story of an introverted middle-aged...

Barcelona-born director Carla Simón, whose sophomore film “Alcarràs” clinched the 72nd Berlinale Golden Bear last year, received the 2023 National Cinematography Award, one of the highest honors bestowed by Spain’s Ministry of Culture.

On hand to present the award in a ceremony held at the San Sebastian Film Festival was Miguel Iceta, Spain’s Minister of Culture and Sports, who first addressed Simón in Catalan before switching to Spanish: “With only two feature films, you have left your mark on the recent history of cinema in our country: a short but undisputed trajectory in terms of its strength and personality, recognized both nationally and internationally. A career that is nothing but the promise of a much longer and fruitful one.”

“This award, if you’ll allow me the audacity, is also for all the women who accompany you, for all your professional colleagues and peers, for all those women who,...

“Return to Dust,” the latest work from Chinese director Li Ruin won the top Golden Spike at the Seminci Valladolid Film Festival, Spain’s traditional arthouse platform, which this last week sold over 100,000 tickets for the second time in a row, a sign of much needed, if temporary, vitality in Spain’s desperately sagging art pic market.

“An absorbing, beautifully framed drama that makes a virtue — possibly too much a virtue — of simplicity,” stated Variety’s Jessica Kiang in her Berlinale review, “Dust” is set in a decimated Chinese village, where a downtrodden couple in an arranged marriage forge an unexpected bond as they eke out a living from the land. “Return to Dust” was released in China in September.

“Eo” director Jerzy Skolimowski (“11 Minutes”) earned the best director prize for “a damning polemic on our relationship to other intelligent species — as free labor, food and companions — as seen through the dewy,...

Indian helmer Pan Nalin’s “Last Film Show” walked off on Saturday with the top prize, the Golden Spike, at the 66th Valladolid Intl. Film Festival, one of Spain’s biggest and oldest film events and a bastion of festival-prized art film titles.

The French-Indian co-production marks Nalin’s homage to celluloid and is told through the eyes of a nine-year-old boy whose life is turned on its head after he watches his first film at the cinema. World premiering at Tribeca, it became the first foreign-language feature to score as the first runner up for Tribeca’s Audience Award.

Writer and director Pan Nalin said: “What we started in our solitude in a remote countryside of Gujarat has now started to echoing in multitudes the world over. Winning the best picture Golden Spike at the Seminci is like belonging to the rich history of cinema that Valladolid has stood for nearly seven decades.

This year’s San Sebastian Film Festival is in mourning as Spanish director Mario Camus, celebrated for his sober but caring adaptations of distinguished Spanish novels such as “La Colmena” – written by Nobel prize winner Camilo José Cela – Ignacio Aldecoa’s “Young Sánchez” and “The Holy Innocents” by Miguel Delibes, died on Saturday in Santander, northern Spain, the city where he was born. Camus was 86.

Among his career achievements, Camus took the Berlin Golden Bear for best film with “La Colmena” (1983), a Cannes Prize Ecumenical Jury prize for “The Holy Innocents” (1984). Such films proved a highpoint in Spain’s ruling socialist left’s dream, pushed when Pilar Miró took over as head of Spain’s Icaa film institute in 1982, of maintaining Spanish cinema’s social edge but priming its production levels and taking it onto a European stage.

Camus also participated in Cannes’ Directors Fortnight and at the Moscow Festival...