At the eighth edition of the San Sebastian Festival, held in July 1960, an as yet unknown 10-year-old girl was introduced to the world under the artistic pseudonym of Marisol, months prior to the premiere of her first cinema appearance, Un rayo de luz (Luis Lucia Mingarro), at the Venice Festival. The archives of the event records this first visit to San Sebastian, with an extremely young Josefa Flores González posing in the María Cristina Hotel during a subtly designed early visit.

A photograph portraying a budding Marisol, who would come to San Sebastian for her presentation to the cultural elite and international launch, after having been “discovered” during a performance for the dictator, Francisco Franco, by the influential Spanish producer Manuel Goyanes.

That early visit would mean many things. Marisol would soon turn into one of the most popular people in Spain, becoming, as well as a household name, a breath of fresh air both for the regime and for Spanish cinema. Her figure triumphantly personified the stamp of a folkloric, musical cinema, “of light and colour”, conveying the idea of a forward-thinking regime. This early visit would also symbolise an optimistic look towards the future and the idea of a country which, like herself, could be seen as up-and-coming, promising, young and modern, irradiating an apparent and revamped image of womanliness in the shape of a young blonde girl with blue eyes. A spirited, angelical and extroverted figure morphed into a matter of State and of the image it was projecting to the exterior.

The actress would return to San Sebastian on several occasions, coinciding with her meteoric rise, but also with her progressive and calculated stepping back from the industry. The photographs in the collection contain the record of her visits: in the year 1963 accompanying the programme of children’s films organised by the “Cendrillón” film club and promoted by the programmer Sonika-Bo and La Cinémathèque française; in 1967, amidst the fervour of her fans and the ritual of the red carpet; and in 1985, – by then signing as Pepa Flores and symbolically cutting her ties with all legacies of the past – for what was perhaps one of her last public appearances, at the press conference accompanying the film Caso cerrado directed by Juan Caño and screened in the Zabaltegi-New Directors section of the Festival’s 33rd edition.

The exhibition organised in 2021 by the Zinemaldia 70: All Possible Stories team reflecting the first steps of certain moviemakers, actresses and film industry professionals present in the early years of the Festival, which had until then based its visual history around a limited repertoire of glamour and big stars, set about highlighting the tensions existing in the field of politics, gender and class – to which these figures generally gave shape – and which have gone unnoticed in the Festival narrative.