2025-02

Digital collections

Letter from Nelly Kaplan to Francisco Ferrer on the invitation to the festival

February 2025

In the spring of 1962, during the second and last year of the mandate of Francisco Ferrer Monreal, administrator of the Victoria Eugenia Theatre who had taken over the direction of the Festival after the resignation of Antonio de Zulueta y Besson, the archive records an invitation to attend the event for a budding young female filmmaker.

It would be sixteen years before that French-Argentine filmmaker, Nelly Kaplan, visited the now, since 1977, democratic San Sebastian Festival for the first time. With the rights regained after Franco’s death, the San Sebastian Women’s Assembly organised a cycle of films made by women that settled accounts with a past of under-representation. In this context, Kaplan presented her feminist feature film A Very Curious Girl (La fiancée du pirate, 1969), which nine years earlier had been part of the Official Selection of the Venice Film Festival as the only female director among 26 films in competition.

On her first visit to San Sebastian, Kaplan participated in various discussion and reflection panels organised within the framework of the retrospective section, alongside filmmakers such as Vivian Ostrovsky, Rosine Grange and Paula Delsol. Two years later, in 1980, the Festival would recover her fourth feature film, Néa (1976), as part of the radical initiative Barrios y Pueblos, which circulated the film to the Cine Modelo in Zarautz. By then, her feminist novel Memorias de una lectora de hojas (1974), written under the pseudonym Belén, had been banned and deprived of its distribution by French censorship for five years.

Back in 1962, at a Festival that had not yet programmed a single film by a female filmmaker in competition (and would not do so until the 1965 edition with Yuliya Solntseva’s The Enchanted Desna), Kaplan turned down the Festival’s offer to attend as a guest, citing work commitments. That same year, the filmmaker was one of the driving forces behind the launch of the Cannes Critics’ Week, becoming a member of its selection committee until 1968, with Georges Sadoul as general delegate of the parallel section.

Although her visit was delayed for several years, her name could be read on the Festival’s screens as early as 1960, with Abel Gance’s competition film Austerlitz, in which she was listed as a screenwriter.

Document

Letter from Nelly Kaplan to Francisco Ferrer on the invitation to the festival

Identity statement area

ID: 43655

Catalogue number: AO1962-1963.COR

Location: M01.B01.C06

Classification scheme: 4.1.4. International directors

Title: Letter from Nelly Kaplan to Francisco Ferrer on the invitation to the festival

Date of creation: 1962-05-25

Level of description: Simple documentary unit

Extent and medium of the unit of description: 1 document

Context area