Document of the month

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Document of the month

May 2026

On 26 July 1989, a postcard sent by the festival’s General Secretary, Pilar Olascoaga, arrived at the San Sebastián Film Festival offices. The postcard revealed several points of interest: the message had been sent from the heart of the Soviet Union, just three months before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The San Sebastián Film Festival delegation was witnessing a historic moment.

The Moscow International Film Festival was first held in 1935, just three years after the foundation of the world’s longest-running film festival, the Venice Film Festival. That first edition, held on the initiative of Joseph Stalin as head of the USSR and sponsored by the state as a showcase for the constructivist avant-garde, had Sergei Eisenstein as its first jury president. Its second edition would not take place until well into the post-war period, in 1959, at the height of the ideological conflict and with the world divided between the Soviet and Western blocs.

The powerful International Federation of Film Producers Associations (FIAPF), which in that context established itself as the arbiter of a festival circuit that had become a battleground for cultural diplomacy, required the Moscow International Film Festival to be held every two years, alternating with the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (Czech Republic), in exchange for its accreditation and official recognition within the organisation. The alternation between the two festivals was, according to the official account, a response to the need to avoid direct competition for film premieres. Paradoxically, at that time, the Western bloc boasted as many as four film festivals accredited in its highest category: Berlin, Cannes, Venice and San Sebastián.

It was not until 1995, five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, that the Moscow festival became an annual event. The San Sebastián Film Festival archives record the presence of its delegation at this event from at least 1983, through reports, letters and internal documents.

Since early 2022, the FIAPF has imposed sanctions on the country by indefinitely suspending the official accreditation of the Moscow International Film Festival and the Message to Man festival in St Petersburg, in the wake of the war in Ukraine.

Document

Postcard sent from Moscow by the Festival’s General Secretary, Pilar Olascoaga

Identity statement area

ID: 49276

Catalogue number: AO1989.0145

Location: M05.B02.C01

Classification scheme: 1. EXECUTIVE

Title: Postcard sent from Moscow by the Festival’s General Secretary, Pilar Olascoaga

Date of creation: 1989-07-26

Level of description: Simple documentary unit

Extent and medium of the unit of description: 1 document

Context area

Producer: Pilar Olascoaga

Content and structure area

Places: Moscú (Rusia)

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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