The 37th edition of the San Sebastian Festival, the last one directed by Diego Galán in his first period as General Delegate of the event, can boast a historic visit: Bette Davis would become the first woman to receive the Donostia Award, the honorary accolade introduced by the Festival in 1986. San Sebastian would also host the last public appearance of a Hollywood icon, who would die in Paris a few days later.

Davis began her artistic career in theatre and made her movie debut with Bad Sisters (Hobart Henley, 1931), conceived barely three years prior to the Motion Picture Production Code, establishing a set of censorship guidelines and going on to shape North American productions for more than three decades. Davis is impossible to separate from the archetypical femme fatale and her characters largely portrayed wicked women – even if later studies have given us the opportunity of a new take on her characters. Her performances earned her eleven Academy Award nominations and two wins, as well as the title of first woman President of the North American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

The Festival’s press collection is once again revealed as a source for imagining the films that might have been. As recorded by the Diario de Navarra in one of the last interviews given by Davis, her close ties to the American institution could have been immortalised on film: “I would like to make a film about the things that happen behind the scenes of the Oscar bid and awards. It is a project I have been toying with for some time now, but which has always been delayed for one reason or another.”

The negotiation of her visit to San Sebastian was possible thanks to the intermediation of the producer Wolf Kochmann, who designed, with the Festival team, a detailed agenda suited to Davis’s by now very poor health, which Kathryn Sermak, her personal assistant, took charge of executing: a press conference at which she would look back over her career and her participation in the Donostia Award gala. As announced by Kochmann in the letter sent to Pilar Olascoaga following the actress’s death, the press conference given in the María Cristina Hotel was broadcast on TV channels throughout the USA.

Her last public appearance was at the Festival closing gala, where she presented two Golden Shells ex aequo. The first, to the North American production Homer and Eddie by the Soviet moviemaker and co-writer of Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966), Andrei Konchalovsky, who expressed his gratitude for the award by going down on his knees before one of the great Hollywood icons. Davis would give a second historical award to Jorge Sajinés, the first Bolivian filmmaker to receive the recognition, for his movie La nación clandestina, presented by the militant filmmaking group, Ukamau.