In October 2020, the Zinemaldia 70: All Possible Histories research project team began the task of conservation, cataloguing and research on the photographic representation of the San Sebastian Film Festival, based on materials held in the Festival archive and the Kutxateka collection. This exhibition, which focuses on photographs over 50 years old (from the first Festival in 1953 until 1970), presents some initial conclusions on this work in progress. The photos therefore represent the first steps of the Festival, but also the first steps of a critical research process into its visual history.

Traditionally, the imagery around the Festival in that period has been built on a very limited catalogue of images: great directors portrayed in emblematic places, stars posing on the red carpet, or cocktail parties exclusively reserved for celebrities.

Our team’s aim was rather different: to focus on the off-screen aspect of the prevailing imagery, searching for photographs that allow us to construct a different gaze. Through this selection of thirty photographs we set out to discern a number of political, gender and class tensions that have usually gone unnoticed in the classic narratives of the Festival.

On one hand, be+J7yond the traditional representation of the film stars, the exhibition focuses on women who have taken part in the Festival doing jobs that are out of the media spotlight or ignored by the mainstream discourses of the film world. They range from the first three women filmmakers who competed in the Official Section to journalists, programmers, workers and producers. The selection also examines the reification mechanisms that come into play with film stars that turn them into both a commodity and the object of media fascination.

On the other, the exhibition focuses on what happens off the red carpet, reflecting on the social and symbolic frontiers that exist between the expectations aroused in the audience by the Festival and the exclusivity and elitism of most of its ceremonies. Through this reflection on the inside and outside of the Festival, the exhibition questions the presence of the apparatus of Franco’s dictatorship and the instrumentalization of the event as an international showcase for the regime — but it also reflects the ‘green shoots’ of freedom that opened up under the umbrella of the Festival.