The revolutionary year of 1968 had witnessed the suspension of the Cannes Film Festival for the first time in its history, following pressure from student strikes joined by artists and filmmakers. In Europe, the insurrection spread to other film festivals and exhibitions, resulting in major disturbances in Venice, Pesaro and Knokke-Le Zoute (Belgium), among others. Just a couple of years later, the flame would also be ignited in Berlin, following a censorship scandal against a film that portrayed the harsh actions of the U.S. military during the invasion of Vietnam.

While the struggles of the ‘1968 generation’ were stirring up other international festivals, the official discourse of the Spanish regime, endorsed by the media and the festival organisers themselves, presented the San Sebastian Festival as “calm”.

This interview with the festival’s management – led since the previous edition by Miguel de Echarri – conducted on the eve of its 16^th edition, emphasised its most cosmopolitan aspects, such as the tourist appeal inherent in the institution and its relationship with the region and its citizens. The interview’s responses stripped these cinematic events of any political dimension, stating that “film festivals like Venice and Cannes, and also San Sebastián, were created for tourism purposes”.

Subsequent researches in the field of festival studies have shed light on this aspect: the Biennale was founded in 1932 by Benito Mussolini’s fascist government to promote a national Italian cinema that would compete with other cinemas – keeping a privileged position for German cinematography – and during the first years of activity, until its interruption during the Second World War, it was a fertile ground for the exhibition of propaganda films. The Berlinale and the San Sebastián Film Festival, despite their differences, were both created in the post-war period and were inextricably linked to the Cold War context. While the former, created by the U.S. army, attempted to redefine itself in a city literally divided by an ideological wall, the latter, conceived in the midst of a dictatorship, became the cultural flagship of the regime’s developmentalist phase. In short, a ‘film Olympics’ permeated by state interests, as Marijke de Valck points out in Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia.

And, of course, the 1968 Festival was not far removed from an international climate that protested against the increasingly rigid structures of the competitions: after having suffered for more than two years the impositions of Francoist censorship, the film Ama Lur (Nestor Basterretxea, Fernando Larruquert) was screened out of competition, an effort of cultural resistance that the regime tried to distort. Some international media outlets also reported a series of protests by Basque youth after the screening of the American film The Legend of Lylah Clare (Robert Aldrich), with pro-Vietnam pamphlets being thrown and cries of ‘Yankees go home’. And amid the supposed calm, the most deafening of bustles: the censorship suffered live by the New American Cinema retrospective, after three days of screenings.