When filmmaker Ricardo Muñoz Suay received the commission to organise the round table on Literature and Cinema as part of the San Sebastián Festival’s twenty-ninth edition, he imagined a meeting with the most notable personalities. His thoughts turned to Jorge Luis Borges, to whom this invitation was extended, and to other leading figures mentioned in the letter: Juan Rulfo, Gabriel García Márquez, Juan Marsé, Octavio Paz, Julio Cortázar, amongst others. He similarly envisaged an exchange between writers and directors, also suggesting that Glauber Rocha, Raúl Ruiz and Fernando “Pino” Solanas be included in the event. The ideas giving its origin to the ambitious proposal can be found in the documents stored in the Festival archives.

A year earlier, in 1980, the FIAPF had withdrawn its highest accreditation of non-specialised competition from San Sebastián. In the official publication of that edition, the self-same Muñoz Suay wrote, with the title of In defence of the Festival, a text in which he ruminated on the necessary characteristics of the event, both referring to its programme and to its parallel activities, in order that its audience would feel it to be their own.

The newspaper headline on that anticipated date of 1981 announced the round table on Latin American Literature and the Cinema. The KU nightclub provided the setting for the meeting, and writers and filmmakers took their places at the tables on what was ordinarily the dance floor. The discotheque, set up in library mode. “The occasion, which congregated more than twenty important personalities related to the world of film and literature, nevertheless had a number of outstanding absences which would have lent greater interest to the meeting” wrote one journalist. The initial outreach enjoyed by the activity since its conception lost a certain amount of its impact at the moment of going ahead. But Muñoz Suay opened the discussion by stressing the importance of the meeting: it was a cultural extension of the Festival that he hoped would be repeated every year. Participants in the round table were, amongst others, Román Gubern, Beatriz de Moura, Jorge Asís, Marco Ferreri y Guillermo Cabrera Infante, seen in this archive photograph.

The activity would be repeated in 1982, with the title of The feuilleton and the serial story. Mario Vargas Llosa opened the debate placing emphasis on the straightforward nature of adapting that literary genre to the cinema; the discussion continued in the voices of Manuel Puig, Paco Ignacio Taibo, Beatriz Guido, Néstor Almendros, Vicente Molina Foix and many others. At the 1983 edition, the round table would focus on the detective story and film noir; the featured guest was Patricia Highsmith, who would attend the meeting alongside Samuel Fuller, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Monte Hellman and Ricardo Muñoz Suay himself.  

The archive has no trace of the response to that letter addressed to Borges who was, no doubt about it, one of the most notable absences from the first edition of the event. However, amid those agitated and ebullient years of the Festival, the activity gained strength in its continuation. To some extent, the principles of the project for gathering and talking about literature and the cinema, the one envisaged by Muñoz Suay in 1981, went on to enjoy consolidation over time.