By Séamas McSwiney

Prizes at the San Sebastian Film Festival are called ‘concha’ or shells, as in seashells – understandable given its vast and splendid city-centre beaches.

This year’s Concha de Oro went to Sparrows by Runar Runarsson, an intricate coming of age story that takes place in rural Iceland. Sixteen-year old Ari is shunted to remote Westfjords from Reykjavik by his mother. She’s off to save Africa, and he now has to contend with his deadbeat dad, country life and sexual awakenings in a place where there’s not much to do. Classic cinema themes, but the quality of the filmmaking and its narrative finesse turned it to gold in Donostia (the Basque name for this northern Spanish city). 

It’s worth observing for a country as small as Iceland that this is the second rural drama with zoological title to get a major award this year, after Rams took the top prize in Un Certain Regard at Cannes 2015.

The Concha de Plata for best director went to Belgian Joachim Lafosse for Les Chevaliers Blancs (The White Knights), a Franco-Belgian co-production loosely based on the real renegade humanitarian operation called Zoe’s Ark that hit the news in 2007. 

A group of French aid volunteers go to Chad to bring back 300 orphans for adoption. Their impulsive leader, played by Cannes 2015 best actor Vincent Lindon, is soon out of his depth as they find themselves breaking all the rules be they moral, legal or simply of good sense, venturing into battle zones and fudging the fact that some of the kids are not actually orphans. 

By the end it is hard to have sympathy with any of these well-intentioned idiots. Still, the tale is compelling, echoing as it does in small ways our current difficulty in fathoming the current refugee crisis.

San Sebastian’s niche specialty is showcasing new Spanish cinema and offering an opportunity for Latin America to bring its movies to Europe via the Spanish mother ship. Co-production meetings and pitches are organised by Creative Europe, while works-in-progress are screened for professionals.

Two diametrically opposed Spanish films captured attention, both of them ideal festival fare for quite different reasons. In competition, Imanol Uribe’s Lejos del Mar (Far from the Sea) is a darkly philosophical drama involving Santi, a Basque separatist, who is released from prison after serving almost 30 years for the murder of a police officer. He moves south to Valencia to hook up with a younger prison colleague who is dying of a lingering disease. As chance would have it, he meets Marina, his friend’s doctor who it turns out was the eight-year-old daughter that witnessed the murder of her police office father, an event which has, like for Santi, defined her life ever since. Very worthy and quite grim, like many films found on the festival circuit.

So it is often with relief that we get a film like Isla Bonita, a cinematic sitcom that starts off in a light-hearted Rohmer-ish way, where conversations take the place of concise dialogue and characters intellectualise about such heady subjects as whether commercials can also be art. We’re on the sunny island of Menorca with our bespectacled Woody Allen-like hero, Fer, a burned out commercials director who is turning his hand to documentary film. He’s come from Madrid to shoot interview footage and visit his old ad industry buddy, Miguel Angel, who introduces him to his coterie.

Between shopping, sculpture and Spanish cuisine, people fall in and out of love in this microcosm of savoury seaside banality. The loose script tightens like a feisty operetta as the Allen style – the ‘funny ones’ – confirms itself while tossing in an Almodovarian gender twist towards the end. Great art? Probably not. Good fun? Ciertamente.