Two figures very close to Pedro Almodovar, his longtime producer Esther García and repeat star Marisa Paredes, will be honored by Spain’s most prestigious film festival, San Sebastián.
García will receive a Donostia Award for career achievement.
Paredes, who died in December, will feature on this year’s San Sebastian poster.
Working with Agustín Almódovar, García has produced all Almodovar’s films since 1986’s “Matador,” released a year after Pedro and brother Agustín founded El Deseo in Madrid to hone a production model which, often working on contained budgets, realized the potential of Almodovar’s talent, allowing him creative oversight over the whole of a film while relieving him of rushed production schedules and the need to abandon his more out-there innovation and humor in order to recoup on bigger budgeted productions.
At El Deseo, García has also produced third-party titles from Guillermo del Toro, Lucrecia Martel, Damián Szifron, Pablo Trapero, Julia Solomonoff, Luis Ortega, Andrés Wood and Miguel Gonçalves Mendes, often in their early careers. García latest release, Oliver Laxe’s “Sirât,” won a Jury Prize at May’s Cannes.
Announcing García’s Donostia Award on Wednesday, the San Sebastián Festival referred to her as “a key figure in bringing Spanish and Latin American cinema into the international arena,” and someone who is “constantly driven by her identifying features of independence, derring-do and excellence.”
García’s Donostia Award is the first time the plaudit has gone to a first-and-foremost industry figure, though some awardees – Francis Ford Coppola, for instance – have doubled up as producers as well.
The Donostia Award has drawn many of the good and great in the world’s film industry to San Sebastián, adding prestige star fire power to the Festival.. Last year’s recipients alone took in Pedro Almodóvar, Cate Blanchett and Javier Bardem, the last accepting an Award postponed from 2023 due to the SAG-AFTRA strike.
Instituted in 1986 by then festival co-director Diego Galán to bring to San Sebastián legends of Hollywood – such as Betty Davis in 1989 in her last public appearance – the Donostia Awards have come to focus on still jobbing and far younger figures, such as Penélope Cruz in 2019.
García is the ninth Spanish figure to receive the Donostia Award after Fernando Fernán-Gómez, Paco Rabal, Antonio Banderas, Carmen Maura, Cruz, Bardem, Victor Erice and Almodóvar.
While she acted in 75 movies, Marisa Paredes will be best remembered for the five films she starred in directed by Almodóvar, from “Dark Habits” (1983) “High Heels” (1991), “The Flower of My Secret” (1995), “All About My Mother” (1999) and “The Skin I Live In” (2011). Of all these, she thought she turned in one of her career-best performances in “The Flower of My Secret,” which marks the beginning of Almodóvar’s return to his roots and world of his mother, a reconnection which continues to this day.
In real life, Paredes had a natural elegance, compounded by her favouring dresses by Spain-based designer Sybille which J.A. Bayona noted, reacting to her death, gave her “an aura of myth.” Yet, he added, “she was friendly, empathetic and always attentive.”
She also had a large sense of humor and ready smile. Something of that mix can be seen in the festival poster, designed by the San Sebastián studio Wallijai based on a shot taken by the photographer Manuel Outumuro in Madrid in 2000.
Paredes poses in a black dress whose style imitates that of a classic Spanish mantilla shawl. She looks, however, just about to break out in laughter.
Marisa Paredes, SSIFF Poster 2025
Courtesy of SSIFF
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