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San Sebastian — With its awards ceremony Saturday night, the San Sebastian Festival’s 72nd edition is heading into its final straits. Following, 10 takeaways from what looks like its biggest edition ever in star wattage, the caliber of Spanish filmmaking and the number of deals reported by Variety, set in the context of vertiginous change in international independent film and TV landscape.

San Sebastian 2024: The Stars Align

Johnny Depp visited kids in a San Sebastian hospital dressed as Jack Sparrow; Javier Bardem teared up remembering his mother, the exemplary Pilar Bardem; Pedro Almodóvar remembered back 44 years to his first San Sebastian, performing at disco Ku and ending up on the beach at 8 in the morning. Cate Blanchett, accepting her Donostia Award, praised the “uncertainty which drives me.”

Never before have so many stars descended on San Sebastian. Why? “I think two factors are at play,” San Sebastian Film Festival director José Luis Rebordinos told Variety.

San Sebastian — Javier Bardem, at San Sebastián to pick up his 2023 Donostia Award for career achievement, announced he will star in “El Ser Querido,” the next film from Rodrigo Sorogoyen. The director’s “The Beasts” won a best foreign film Cesar Award in 2023, beating out four Cannes Festival winners.

Bardem will play opposite Vicky Luengo, star of Sorogoyen’s hugely popular TV series “Riot Police” in a story written by Sorogoyen and his longtime co-scribe Isabel Peña, which Bardem described at a Donostia Award press conference as a “father-daughter drama” who re-meet after many years.”

According to the film’s synopsis, “El Ser Querido” turns on an acclaimed film director and his daughter, an unsuccessful actress, who shoot a film together after years of estrangement and a difficult past that none of them want to talk about.

“El Ser Querido” is one from a first slate of six auteur event...

Javier Bardem is currently making headlines for his role of Stilgar in Dune: Part Two. The Denis Villeneuve directorial has been getting rave reviews with 94% on the Tomatometer. And one of the positives on the movie is how Bardem plays the fanatic leader of the Fremen, mentoring Timothée Chalamet’s Paul Atreides. But with as menacing and zealous his character is in the movie, he is quite the opposite in real life.

Javier Bardem in Dune: Part Two

Bardem broke into the silver screen early on when he was only six years old. Coming from a family that has long been part of the movie industry in Spain, and being the son of the popular Spanish actress, Pilar Bardem, the Skyfall actor initially did not want to become an actor. It wasn’t until his lead role Bigas Luna’s 1992 directorial film, Jamón Jamón, that he started taking acting more seriously.

Javier Bardem is the first recipient of San Sebastian’s prestigious Donostia Award for this year’s 71st edition.

He will accept the prize, San Sebastian’s highest accolade, granted for career achievement, at the festival’s opening gala on September 22. His image will also feature on the poster of this year’s edition, unveiled today in San Sebastian.

The only surprise about Bardem’s Donostia Award is that it hasn’t come earlier. A rugby player for Spain’s national team, Bardem first came to fame as a local village hulk playing opposite his now spouse Penélope Cruz in Bigas Luna’s 1992 flamboyant social critique “Jamón, Jamón.”

Bardem wanted, however, to be an actor, not a sex symbol. Refusing to be typecast, his full international breakthrough came in 2000 thanks to a tearaway performance as gay Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas in Julian Schnabel’s “Before Night Falls,” and in Spain,...

Pedro Almodovar’s ‘Parallel Mothers’ went home empty-handed.

The Good Boss, directed by Fernando León de Aranoa and starring Javier Bardem, scored big at the 36th edition of the Goyas, the Spanish Academy Awards held on Saturday in Valencia. With a record 20 nominations, it won six wards including best film, best director and screenplay for León de Aranoa and best actor for Javier Bardem.

Pedro Almodóvar’s Parallel Mothers, nominated for eight awards, left empty handed.

Produced by The Mediapro Studio and Reposado PC, The Good Boss premiered in competition at the San Sebastián Film Festival and went on to...

Each year, Variety honors individuals who have offered a notable contribution to the film landscape for the year. The 2021 Creative Impact Award honorees have made their mark in awards hopefuls.

Javier Bardem, Creative Impact in Acting Award

Academy Award winner Bardem (“No Country for Old Men”) will be feted, celebrating a busy year that includes roles in Aaron Sorkin’s “Being the Ricardos” and Fernando León de Aronoa’s “The Good Boss,” Spain’s entry for the international film Oscar. “It is a huge honor that I take it with lots of gratitude and humility,” says Bardem.

In “Being the Ricardos,” he portrays real-life Desi Arnaz, alongside Nicole Kidman as Lucille Ball. The entire film takes place in one pressure-cooker week during the shooting of their classic CBS sitcom “I Love Lucy,” specifically when gossip columnist Walter Winchell reports that Ball registered as a member of the Communist Party back in the 1930s.

Updated with full winners list: French-Lebanese filmmaker Audrey Diwan has become the sixth female director to win the Venice Film Festival’s top prize, the Golden Lion, with her 1963-set abortion drama L’Evénement (Happening). She’s also the second in a row after Chloé Zhao took last year’s Lion with Nomadland.

An emotional Diwan said Saturday: “I did this movie with anger. I did it with desire, also my heart and my head. I wanted Happening to be an experience, a journey in the skin of this young woman.”

In the film, Anne (Anamaria Vartolomei) is a bright young student with a promising future ahead of her. But when she becomes pregnant, she sees the opportunity to finish her studies and escape the constraints of her social background disappearing. With her final exams fast approaching and her belly growing, Anne resolves to act, even if she has to confront shame and pain,...

Pilar Bardem, the mother of Javier Bardem and mother in law of Penelope Cruz has passed away, with the news being confirmed in a joint statement from Javier and his siblings, Carlos and Monica, on Saturday via Carlos' Twitter account. The actress' children then followed up with a joint tribute to their mother, who died following complications from a non-Covid related lung disease. The Goya Award winner was 82 years old and has appeared in a variety of Spanish language movie and TV roles in her career.

"We want to share the news that Pilar Bardem, our mother, our example, has died," Carlos shared via his Twitter account in Spanish. "She departed in peace and without suffering, surrounded by the love of her family. We know the love and admiration many felt for her, both in Spain and beyond, for her work as an actress and as a fighter who always stood in solidarity.

Spanish actress and activist Pilar Bardem—mother of actors Monica, Carlos, and Javier Bardem—died on Saturday at the Ruber Hospital in Madrid because of complications from lung disease not related to Covid-19. She was 82.

The Goya Award-winning actress (the Spanish equivalent of an Oscar) appeared in a variety of film, theater, and TV projects throughout her career in her native Spain. Her most highly lauded project is 1995’s Nadie hablará de nosotras cuando hayamos muerto (Nobody Will Speak of Us When We’re Dead), which earned 8 Goya awards, including Bardem’s Best Supporting Actress nod.

“We want to share the news that Pilar Bardem, our mother, our example, has died,” Carlos shared via Twitter in Spanish. “She departed in peace and without suffering, surrounded by the love of her family. We know the love and admiration many felt for her, both in Spain and beyond, for her work as...

Javier Bardem started in showbiz as a child actor in Spanish TV series “El pícaro” in 1974, landing his first recurring role at age 17 in 1986 in drama “Segunda enseñanza.” Hollywood success followed; he played Cuban poet and novelist Reinaldo Arenas in Julian Schnabel’s “Before Night Falls,” earning the first of three Oscar nominations. In buzzy Greenpeace documentary “Sanctuary,” which premiered in the official selection at the Toronto Film Festival, Bardem forgoes his dramatic chops to produce and narrate this nonfiction work about preserving marine life in the increasingly warming Antarctic.

This isn’t the typical film role you get offered. What led you here?

Greenpeace invited me to do this campaign. We’re trying to create the largest sea sanctuary in the world in the Antarctic Ocean. I didn’t blink; I said yes. They explained to me what exactly they’re looking to achieve and why. At that table...

Lyon, France – Javier Bardem charmed his audience at a masterclass during the Lumière Film Festival on Monday, eliciting laughter with stories of his youth, learning English by way of AC/DC, his famous family and expounding on the talent, compassion and genius of the filmmakers with whom he has worked, among them Bigas Luna, Julian Schnabel, the Coen brothers and Woody Allen.

Bardem reiterated his support for Allen, who directed the Oscar-winning Spanish actor in 2008’s “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” saying he would work with him again at a day’s notice.

“He’s a genius,” Bardem said, adding that in this time of the Me Too movement, “I would work with him tomorrow.” He stressed that Allen’s legal status today has not changed since the last they worked together in 2007 and noted that the director had never been found guilty of any crime. “Today, 11 years later, it is the same accusation.

A brilliant actor with piercing eyes, Javier Bardem received his third Academy Award nomination for "Biutiful," in recognition of his role as Uxbal, a single, struggling father with cancer who decides to take the path to redemption before he dies.

Bardem took home an Oscar in 2007 as Best Supporting Actor in "No Country for Old Men" and was nominated for Best Actor in 2000 for "Before Night Falls." Javier is also a five-time Goya winner, Spain's version of the Academy Award.

San Sebastian, Spain -- Javier Bardem received Spain's National Film Award on Friday as the San Sebastian International Film Festival toasted a stellar year topped by his Oscar-winning performance in "No Country for Old Men."

Surrounded by his mother, actress Pilar Bardem, a significant chunk of the Spanish film industry and friend Antonio Banderas, Bardem beamed as he received the prize from Spanish Culture Minister Cesar Antonio Molina at a ceremony in the packed banquet hall of the Maria Cristina Hotel.

"It's an award that comes at this specific moment in time from a profession I love and for which I owe a lot to a lot of people," Bardem said.

The Spanish actor, who plays a seductive artist in Woody Allen's "Vicky Cristina Barcelona," which opens Friday in Spain, said he will divvy up the 30,000 euro ($43,000) cash prize among the Saharan people, the Spanish Actors' foundation Aisge and his mentor,...

San Sebastian, Spain -- Homegrown heroes Antonio Banderas and Javier Bardem were the stars of the fuchsia-colored carpet as the 56th annual San Sebastian International Film Festival kicked off Thursday night.

Banderas, due to receive the festival's Donostia Lifetime Achievement award Friday, accompanied director Richard Eyre, presenting the Official Section's opening film, "The Other Man."

Bardem joined Woody Allen and Rebecca Hall at the ceremony to present the director's Spanish film "Vicky Cristina Barcelona," which opens the Zabaltegi Pearls section. Allen, one of the country's most revered directors, said he was looking forward to showing the film -- shot in Spain -- to Spanish audiences.

"It is a pleasure to show the film here. I take every opportunity to visit Spain and enjoyed the three months shooting the film in Spain, with a gifted cast and crew," Allen said.

"San Sebastian brings together the best of all the world's festivals,...