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Document of the month

January 2026

In April 1990, following the end of Diego Galán’s first term as festival director, Peio Aldazabal, who took over the director’s role for that edition, and the festival team made their first steps towards putting together the programme for the 38^th edition. Among the new features, as recorded in the archive, was the proposal for a double retrospective: a tribute to Harry d’Abbadie d’Arrast and an ambitious series that sought to celebrate the work of film archive restoration under the evocative title “Volver a nacer” (Rebirth).

The first retrospective featured four films directed by d’Abbadie d’Arrast, all Hollywood American comedies, and two others directed by Charles Chaplin, A Woman of Paris (1923) and The Gold Rush (1925), in which the Argentine director of Basque origin had collaborated as artistic director and assistant director, respectively. Continuing with the tradition of the film festival, the Festival edited and presented, together with the Basque Film Archive, a monograph about him, written by José Luis Borau and illustrated by Ivan Zulueta, which was the first work ever on the filmmaker.

However, that 1990 edition also became a hub not only for the screening of films recovered by film archives and film libraries, but also for workers from these archives and European institutions, in a pioneering experience on the film festival circuit. In addition to the 44 films programmed, many of them unreleased after restoration and intervention processes and more than 40 years old, including early short and medium-length films by Orson Welles and Douglas Sirk, the first eight minutes of the programme Wintergarten (1895) (the first public screening using the bioscope) and the documentary El president d’Euzkadi, hoste d’honor de Catalunya, made by Laya Films in 1937 which records the arrival of Lehendakari Aguirre and the fundraising to help the Republican army, restorers, conservators and workers from dozens of film institutions and archives, members of the Union of European Cinematheques (UCE), gathered in San Sebastian to seek and discuss legislative and economic solutions in view of the imminent creation of the European Union, founded through the Maastricht Treaty just two and a half years after that collective experience.

As shown in the object reproduced, the hand-made programming and traffic charts for both retrospectives, the effort spanned several countries in an exercise of inter-institutional cooperation in the active search for unpublished film material, which in turn led, in that edition of the 1990 festival, to the celebration of one of the first meeting points for European film archives.

Document

Internal programming document relating to the retrospectives “Volver a nacer” and “Harry d’Abbadie d’Arrast”

Identity statement area

ID: 47207

Catalogue number: AOAO | 1990.0145

Location: M05.B04.C07

Classification scheme: 4.1.10. Print traffic

Title: Internal programming document relating to the retrospectives “Volver a nacer” and “Harry d’Abbadie d’Arrast”

Date of creation: 1990

Level of description: Simple documentary unit

Extent and medium of the unit of description: 4 documents

Context area

Producer: San Sebastian International Film Festival

Content and structure area

Places: Donostia-San Sebastián

Conditions of access and use area

Conditions governing access: Conditions governing access

Conditions governing reproduction: Conditions governing reproduction

Control area

Preservation: Anna Ferrer, Andrea Sánchez

Cataloguing: Edurne Arocena (Ereiten)

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Digital collections