The San Sebastián International Film Festival opened Friday night, 18 September 2026, with a familiar mix of red-carpet prestige and political urgency. At the Kursaal Theatre on Spain’s Basque coast, German director Werner Herzog received the festival’s Donostia Award from Orlando Bloom, while hosts Fariba Sheikhan and Mariona Terés condemned the war in Gaza and voiced solidarity with the Israeli co-directors of the documentary NAZA. The nine-day edition runs through 26 September and opened competition with Fatih Akin’s fantasy romance Ghost Song.

Herzog’s latest feature, Bucking Fastards — starring Kate and Rooney Mara, Bloom and Domhnall Gleeson — is screening in San Sebastián after its Venice world premiere. Bloom’s presentation drew a standing ovation. On stage, Herzog called receiving the honour “from the very hands of Orlando Bloom” a particular privilege, praising the actor as “a living legend at his young age already” and “a treasure of cinema,” according to The Hollywood Reporter’s account of the ceremony.

Basque roads, Aguirre and a country of poets

Herzog framed the award as anything but foreign. He told the audience he has felt a long connection to Basque country through Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), his epic about the Basque Spanish conquistador Lope de Aguirre. Years ago, he said, he walked more than 1,000 kilometres from the Cannes Film Festival into the Pyrenees — and, laughing, admitted he ended up in Biarritz rather than San Sebastián. The encounters with Basque people in the mountains stayed with him.

World Screen reported a further strand of that speech: Herzog praised Basque as “the most incredible language among all the languages of Europe,” noting the community’s deep historical presence in the region. He said he follows Spain’s improvisational poetry competitions online even without speaking the language, and that he feels he belongs to “this country of poets” — receiving the Donostia, he said, from those poets.

The German filmmaker’s career stretch — from Fitzcarraldo (1982) and Grizzly Man (2005) to Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010) — has long mixed obsessive production lore with documentary and fiction. San Sebastián’s lifetime prize places that body of work inside a festival that has spent consecutive editions linking cinema to geopolitics.

Gaza, NAZA and the opening night’s politics

Sheikhan and Terés opened the gala by joining “the myriad of voices calling for an end to genocide, like the one happening in Gaza,” and by standing with NAZA directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, who they said have been threatened by the Israeli government. The line drew thunderous applause, The Hollywood Reporter reported. Presenters also urged an end to “unilateral breaking of international law, to colonialist looting, to sexual violence and to the cruel wars that systematically violate human rights.”

NAZA, built around testimony from Israeli military officers about alleged targeting systems in Gaza, was a Venice breakout and drew an unusually long Lido ovation. Abraham and Szor won Venice’s Special Jury Prize but have faced political pressure at home, including scrutiny from Israeli culture minister Miki Zohar. San Sebastián’s 2025 edition had already called for an immediate ceasefire; Friday’s rhetoric extended that institutional stance into the 2026 opener.

Ghost Song, The Mission at 40, and a second Donostia

Competition opened with Akin’s Ghost Song (Geister), a film shaped by the German-Turkish director’s relationship with anime and manga. It follows two students whose love-at-first-sight bond is cut short when one dies — a haunting festival curtain-raiser rather than a purely ceremonial opener.

The gala also marked the 40th anniversary of Roland Joffé’s 1986 Palme d’Or winner The Mission. Jeremy Irons and producer David Puttnam appeared with a restored screening, reflecting on cinema’s capacity for “caution and hope,” World Screen reported. Fipresci’s grand prix went to Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another; Warner Bros Spain’s Carlos Prada accepted for Anderson, who has previously received the honour for There Will Be Blood, Magnolia and Phantom Thread.

Spanish Academy of Performing Arts president Cayetana Guillén-Cuervo paid tribute to Argentine star Ricardo Darín, the face of the 74th edition’s poster, and to outgoing festival director José Luis Rebordinos in his final year. A second Donostia Award is scheduled for Naomi Watts on Sunday.

Across nine days, San Sebastián is once again using its Kursaal stage as both awards podium and public square — honouring Herzog’s restless cinema while insisting that festival glamour cannot cordon off the wars and legal fights shaping the films on its screens.

This article draws on The Hollywood Reporter and World Screen coverage of the 18 September 2026 opening ceremony, as of 19 September 2026.