- A total of 24 titles from the San Sebastián Festival are competing for the 27th Sebastiane Award.
- Gehitu will bring together more than 20 festivals from eight countries at its twelfth Ibero-American meeting.
- The program will discuss body, education, and intersex, trans, and asexual identities in cinema.
The Sebastiane Award 2026 will place LGTBIQA cinema at the center of the San Sebastián Festival, which takes place from September 18 to 26. Twenty-four titles will compete for the award, and more than twenty Ibero-American competitions will share professional and public debates organized by Gehitu and the Festival.
Twenty-four films and an award with 27 editions
The Basque association Gehitu awards the Sebastiane Prize to the film programmed at the Festival that best reflects the realities, freedoms, and social advances of the LGTBIQA community. In 2026, the recognition reaches its twenty-seventh edition and includes twenty-four candidate titles within the Donostia programming.
The call is part of the 74th edition of the San Sebastián Festival, scheduled from September 18 to 26. The breadth of the list makes the award a transversal reading of the event: it does not function as an isolated section, but as a perspective that traverses selected films in different categories.
Before the Festival, Gehitu already announced the Sebastiane Latino Award for Six Months in the Pink Building with Blue, by Bruno Santamaria Razo. The jury recognized the Latin American feature film that, in their opinion, best represents the defense of LGBTIAQ+ claims and values.
The film is set in 1990s Mexico. Its protagonist, an eleven-year-old boy, discovers his desire for his best friend while facing his father’s illness, diagnosed with HIV. The film premiered at the Cannes Critics’ Week.
A project that returned to San Sebastián as a film
The relationship of the winning feature film with the Festival began before its premiere. In 2022, when it was still a project, it participated in the Co-Production Forum and received the Best Project Award and the Dale! Award, focused on developing links between Latin America and Europe.
In the final phase of Sebastiane Latino, it prevailed over four other works: La virgen silenciosa, by Xavi Sala; Nem Toda História de Amor Acaba em Morte, by Bruno Costa; Bowels of Hell, by Gustavo Vinagre and Gurcius Gewdner; and A Paixão Segundo G.H.B., by Gustavo Vinagre and Vinicius Couto.
The jury included representatives from QueerCineMad and the Maguey Award from the Guadalajara International Film Festival this year. This participation links the recognition with the network of festivals that will gather during the Donostia event.
The Festival will also bring to Gipuzkoa last year’s winner, La misteriosa mirada del flamenco. Actress Paula Dinamarca will attend screenings in Zumárraga on September 16, Errenteria on the 17th, Irun on the 18th, and Deba on the 20th.
More than twenty festivals to think about queer cinema
The 12th Meeting of Ibero-American LGTBIQA+ Film Festivals will bring together more than twenty competitions from Argentina, Brazil, Spain, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico, Mexico, and Uruguay. The event is organized by Gehitu and the San Sebastián Festival with support from state, regional, and municipal institutions.
Among the activities, “Narrate with the Body” stands out, a conversation about autobiography, reality, and fiction in Ibero-American LGBTIAQ+ cinema. The table starts from a programmatic observation: when identity categories prove insufficient, the body can act as a narrative device to think about identity, desire, and memory.
Producer Selva González will moderate the conversation. Participants will include Tiagx Vélez, filmmaker, teacher, and trans; Mallorcan artist Lluís Garau; and Italian-Chilean director and screenwriter Afioco Gnecco, based in Madrid. The session will be on Tuesday, September 22 at 10:30 at the San Telmo Museum, with free entry until full capacity.
The program also includes a presentation on cinema and education by Fernando Vera Moreno, head of the film area at IKERTZE, and a workshop on cultural synergies between Europe and Latin America led by Eloísa Vaello Marco, deputy director of Cooperation and Cultural Action for Sustainable Development at AECID.
Peripheral identities and cultural memory
Another table will address the representation of intersex, trans, and asexual identities in cinema and their invisibility. Participants will include Ian de la Rosa, director of Iván & Hadoum; Asmi Ananda Molina, from Gehitu and Kaleidos; and Ibai Velasco, from Asexual Community Spain.
The day will conclude with the Diversity Meeting at the Gipuzkoa Photographic Society, dedicated to the work of multidisciplinary artist Álvaro Ledesma, who recently passed away. The program thus links industry, education, representation, and cultural memory.
Gehitu will also dedicate the September edition of its magazine to LGTBIQA+ cinema. Pasaitarra artist Sonia Figueirido designs the poster for the Sebastiane Award, conceived around different queer perspectives, the invisibility of some letters of the community, and a figure that conveys dignity, trust, power, and pride.
The Sebastiane Award 2026 is not limited to choosing a film. Its twenty-four candidacies, the Latin American recognition, the territorial screenings, and the festival meeting form a single ecosystem. San Sebastián thus offers a platform, professional conversation, and public access to debates about who narrates, from which body, and with what memory.
