“Ausencias (Absences)” was the title of the editorial that opened the ninth issue of the official magazine of the San Sebastian Film Festival published on September 21st, 1975, three days before the closing of its 23^rd edition. In that euphemistic text, in which the “organized boycott” was described, not without irony, as a “string of coincidences,” an exhaustive review was made of the numerous absences among those invited by the festival: from delegations, film institutes, and journalists to teams of films in competition and already announced juries.

As a reflection of the social transformations, the Festival was suffering from the political tensions of those days. Between August 28th and September 19th, with the Festival already underway, Franco’s government had held several summary courts-martial in which eleven people, including some FRAP and ETA militants, had been sentenced to death. The state of emergency declared in Gipuzkoa and Bizkaia, the Anti-Terrorist Law, the mass strikes, and the closure or seizure of publications such as La Codorniz, Destino, and Triunfo—frequent headlines at the Festival venue—all added to an unsustainable climate that would provoke a wave of international solidarity and the boycott of a Festival that had inaugurated its twenty-third edition with a speech concocted by the Minister of Information and Tourism advocating for the separation of art and politics.

The absences were not only human. Films already submitted to the competition were withdrawn. The Festival archive records a series of telegrams—some extremely explicit—announcing the refusal to attend the event. The telegram from the Swedish Film Institute ordering “the cancellation of the screenings of Swedish films in response to the strong reaction generated by the convictions of Otaegui and Garmendia in Burgos” was followed by telegraphic denunciations from filmmakers Damiano Damiani and Mauro Bolognini, film critics Fernando Lara and Claudio Bertieri, and the concealed last-minute scheduling conflicts of François Truffaut, Michel Piccoli and Joseph Losey, among others.

The ‘string of coincidences’ extended to remote geographies, also outside Europe. And there were those who simply refused to respond to the festival’s invitations. The festival’s archive records the protocolary invitations extended to the American filmmaker John Cassavetes and the actress Gena Rowlands, who were presenting their fourth collaboration in the festival’s Official Selection, but there is no record of any response. As chance would have it, Rowlands won the San Sebastian Award for Best Female Performance at that edition, leaving the mark of her absence in the festival’s photographic archive: at the closing gala, the actress Gina Lollobrigida presents the award for Rowlands to the film’s distributor in Spain, Procinor.