San Sebastian gave its Golden Shell to the one competition film three festivals had already shown

The 74th San Sebastian International Film Festival closed on Saturday at the Kursaal, and Mike Leigh went home with most of it: the Golden Shell for best film, the Jury Prize for Best Screenplay, and a shared Silver Shell for Best Leading Performance for Kate O'Flynn.

Three awards, for a film that had already world-premiered at the 53rd Telluride Film Festival on 4 September, screened in Special Presentations at Toronto, and taken a slot on the Main Slate at the New York Film Festival before it reached Spain.

The competition was billed as seventeen world premieres

Preview coverage described San Sebastian's Official Selection as seventeen films "all making their world premieres." That was never true of Tender Loving Care, and the festival's own scheduling made it obvious — the film arrived with a Metacritic score built from reviews filed in Colorado three weeks earlier.

San Sebastian runs a separate section, Perlak, specifically for films that premiered elsewhere. Sixteen titles were in it this year, competing only for the audience prize. The Golden Shell went to a film that, by the logic of that structure, belonged there.

None of which is a scandal. Festivals make exceptions for directors of Leigh's standing all the time. It is simply not the competition that was advertised.

The full list

• Golden Shell — Tender Loving Care, Mike Leigh
• Special Jury Prize — Border, Ah Biao
• Silver Shell for Best Director — Amanda Kernell, Brace Your Heart
• Silver Shell for Best Leading Performance — Kate O'Flynn, Tender Loving Care, and Asta Kamma August, Growth of the Soil, ex aequo
• Silver Shell for Best Supporting Performance — Javier Camara, 5 More Minutes
• Jury Prize for Best Cinematography — Oskar Dahlsbakken, Growth of the Soil
• Jury Prize for Best Screenplay — Mike Leigh, Tender Loving Care
• Jury Prize for Best Original Score — Amine Bouhafa, Milo
• New Directors Award — Naemi Ada, Body of Glass
• Horizontes Latinos — The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer
• Zabaltegi-Tabakalera — Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma
• Audience Award, Best Film — La Bola Negra
• Audience Award, Best European Film — Naza

Ira Sachs chaired the jury. The Best Original Score prize was new this year, and its first recipient is a composer working on a French competition title.

Two films took six of the eight competition prizes

Tender Loving Care and Growth of the Soil between them account for the Golden Shell, both Silver Shells for performance, the screenplay prize and the cinematography prize. Hans Petter Moland's film did not win a top award and left with two of the craft prizes plus half an acting Shell — the clearest sign of a jury that admired it without putting it first.

Leigh said in July this was most likely his last film

He told IndieWire that Tender Loving Care was "most likely" his final feature, citing physical challenges caused by illness. By the time the festival reviews landed in September the conditional had thinned in the coverage, with one interview headlined around why it is "more than probable."

The film runs 107 minutes. Bleecker Street opens it in the United States on 4 December; StudioCanal handles it internationally. It sits at 100 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes on a sample small enough that the figure should not be relied on.

What is still unknown

Whether Leigh means it. Whether any of the other sixteen competition titles also arrived with a premiere behind them, since the festival publishes countries of origin rather than premiere histories. And what Maialen Beloki, who takes over from Jose Luis Rebordinos in January, makes of a competition that just handed its top prize to a film three other festivals had shown first.

A festival with a dedicated section for films that premiered elsewhere gave its top award to a film that premiered elsewhere. That is either a rule bending for a great director or a rule that has stopped meaning anything, and Saturday night did not say which.