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Festival also adds Michael Showalter’s ’The Eyes of Tammy Faye’ and Thierry de Peretti’s ’Undercover’.

San Sebastian International Film Festival has unveiled its final 2021 competition titles, with new addition One Second, directed by Zhang Yimou, set to open the event.

Starring Wei Fan and Yi Zhang, the Chinese period drama follows a prisoner who escapes from a labour camp at the height of the Cultural Revolution. The film was pulled from the Berlinale in 2019 due to “technical reasons”.

The festival has also added The Eyes of Tammy Faye from Michael Showalter (The Big Sick). It follows the rise...

Starring Jessica Chastain and Andrew Garfield, “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” will receive its European premiere at late September’s San Sebastian Festival.

The biggest film event in the Spanish-speaking world will open with the anticipated “One Second” from China’s Zhang Yimou, which was dramatically pulled from competition at the 69th Berlin Film Festival.

Both titles play in competition, vying for San Sebastian’s top film plaudit, its Golden Shell, where they are joined by French filmmaker Thierry de Peretti’s “Undercover.”

Recounting the rise, fall and redemption of Tammy Faye, the indomitable wife of televangelist Jim Bakker, “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” weighs in as the only U.S. movie in San Sebastian main competition. It catches Chastain on a high as she will receive the TIFF Tribute Actor Award, coinciding with the premiere at Toronto of the film.

The three new films mark the final titles to...

Julie Moulier, Lucie Debay and Arnaud Valois star in the filmmaker’s new feature. Le Bureau is producing and selling the film worldwide. Fabienne Godet finished shooting What If Tomorrow (French title: Si demain…) last week, her fifth feature after Burnt Out, My Greatest Escape (selected in the Forum section at the Berlinale in 2009 and nominated for the 2010 César Award for Best Documentary), A Place on Earth (Audience Award winner at MyFrenchFilmFestival in 2015 and for which Benoît Poelvoorde won the Best Actor Magritte Award in 2014) and Our Wonderful Lives (presented this year at Rotterdam). In the cast, Fabienne Godet is reunited with Julie Moulier (excellent in Our Wonderful Lives and previously appreciated in Let the Girls Play and In Bed with Victoria), who is supported by Belgian actress Lucie Debay (winner of the Best Supporting Actress...

While You Were Peeping: Godet’s Elegy Brimming with Belabored Emotion

With his sophomore directorial effort, Fabienne Godet’s A Place on Earth (Une place sur la Terre) once again places Belgian actor Benoît Poelvoorde in the midst of a doomed romantic entanglement. Surprisingly, the generally comedic thespian excels at these melancholy, brooding types, as evidenced by recent stints in Jean-Pierre Ameris’ Romantics Anonymous (2010) and Benoit Jacquot’s Three Hearts (2014). As an uninspired photographer, Poelvoorde’s equally forlorn here, though he’s on the less dramatic end of the comparable occupationally challenged protagonist featured in Godet’s first feature, Burnt Out (2005). However, the film’s dramatic conflict inevitably ends up feeling a bit forced, the emotionally unstable natures of its romantic leads vaguely administered, which casts an extemporaneous pallor over the script that should leave us feeling as devastated as the roiling soundtrack and sweeping visuals urge.

A struggling photographer,...