The North American moviemaker Nicholas Ray – declared by Jean-Luc Godard to be the filmmaker with whom true modernity began – visited the San Sebastian Festival on two occasions. The first was in 1964 as a member of the International Jury of the event’s 12th edition – coinciding with the premiere in the Official Selection of America, America (1963) by his mentor Elia Kazan. A decade later, he would return as president of the International Jury with full honours: the programming of a retrospective season dedicated to his work and the accompaniment of a monographic publication. For this tribute, Ray himself wrote a letter to Miguel de Echarri with a proposal for the season from which he omitted the inclusion of films such as A Women’s Secret (1949), Flying Leathernecks (1951) and Run for Cover (1955). Despite the desire to screen his most experimental work, the anthology film We Can’t Go Home Again (1973), on which Ray continued to work until his death in 1979 and whose team, a group of students from Harpur College would complete it posthumously, the Festival did not include it in its programme.

The festival archive records a letter from 1965, sent from what was then the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia, in which Nicholas Ray depicts an exciting scenario: during his time at the San Sebastian event in 1964 he would have met and decided to work with the cameraman who was to accompany him on his following project. A film that never came to be.

At a time of great ideological tensions caused by the Cold War, Nicholas Ray, distanced for years from an industry that forgave everything except dissidence, had set up home in Belgrade; largely due to the offers that the Serbian production company Avala Film had made to him. From the catalogue of proposals, Ray started to work intensely on the feature film The Doctor and the Devils, the project that led to his rejection of the invitation to attend the 13th San Sebastian Festival. Finally, for several reasons, most of them related to the financial problems of Avala Film, the movie never saw the light.

In the ten years falling between the filmmaker’s two visits to the San Sebastian Festival, Nicholas Ray was barely able to shoot a single feature-length film, and yet these documents reveal and outline that other history of the cinema: that of unfinished or incomplete films, that of festivals as fertile places for future collaborations and projects, that of the cinema that might have been.