San Sebastian says all 17 Golden Shell films are world premieres and Mike Leigh has played three festivals already

The 74th San Sebastian International Film Festival hands out the Golden Shell on Saturday evening at the Kursaal, with Barbara Goenaga and Fernando Guallar presenting and Michael R. Roskam's Le Faux Soir closing the night. The competition has seventeen films in it. That number is correct, and it has been corrected — the official listing now matches the count, after a stretch where the two did not.

The claim that has not been corrected is the one attached to it: that all seventeen are world premieres.

Mike Leigh's Tender Loving Care world-premiered at the 53rd Telluride Film Festival on 4 September. It then played Toronto in Special Presentations. It is on the Main Slate at the New York Film Festival. By the time it screened in San Sebastian's Official Selection it had three festival berths behind it and a Metacritic score built from reviews filed in Colorado.

The festival has a whole section for exactly this, and Leigh is not in it

San Sebastian runs a parallel strand called Perlak, which exists specifically for films that premiered elsewhere. Sixteen titles are in it this year, fifteen of them competing, and the only prize they are eligible for is the City of Donostia Audience Award. Cristian Mungiu's Palme d'Or winner is in Perlak. So are new films by Andrey Zvyagintsev, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Na Hong-jin and Martin McDonagh.

So the festival is not confused about the distinction. It built an entire section around it. What happened is that a preview written for the trade press compressed "Official Selection" into "world premieres" and the phrase travelled, which is how a festival with 263 films across thirteen sections ends up being described in a single sentence that is wrong about one of its most prominent entries.

The seventeen, for the record

• 5 More Minutes — Javier Ruiz Caldera (Spain)
• The Bad Father — Roberto Bueso (Spain)
• Border — Ah Biao (Hong Kong / US / South Korea)
• Brace Your Heart — Amanda Kernell (Sweden / Norway / Denmark / Iceland / Bulgaria)
• The Debut — Jesse Eisenberg (US)
• Ghost Song — Fatih Akin (Germany), the opening film
• Glaxo — Benjamin Naishtat (Brazil / Argentina)
• Growth of the Soil — Hans Petter Moland (Norway / Denmark / Germany)
• In My Father's Room — Maha Harada (Japan)
• Krux — Tony Vahl (Germany / Poland)
• Milo — Nicole Garcia (France)
• Les Miserables — Fred Cavaye (France)
• My Sad Dead — Pablo Larrain (Argentina / Chile)
• On Behalf of My Son — Gabriel Martins (Brazil)
• Saints — Mikel Gurrea (Spain / Italy)
• Tender Loving Care — Mike Leigh (UK / US / Singapore)
• What Remains — Yesim Ustaoglu (Turkey / France / Luxembourg / Bulgaria)

Ira Sachs chairs the jury, alongside Genki Kawamura, Catherine Paille, Alice Braga, Patricia Lopez Arnaiz, Bill Skarsgard and Mike Goodridge.

Leigh's farewell has hardened in six weeks, and that matters for how you read the reviews

In July, Leigh told IndieWire that Tender Loving Care was "most likely" his last film, citing physical challenges caused by illness. By the time the festival reviews landed in September, the conditional had thinned considerably: one interview was headlined around why it is "more than probable," and a trade piece simply called it his final film.

The film is currently at 100% on Rotten Tomatoes from fifteen reviews and 85 on Metacritic from nine critics. Those are festival-window samples. Variety's notice, which argued the film should have been fuller, is a reminder that a perfect score on fifteen reviews is a statement about fifteen people rather than about a film.

Kate O'Flynn leads as Amy, with Marion Bailey, Paul Jesson and Alice Bailey Johnson. It runs 107 minutes. Bleecker Street opens it in the United States on 4 December; StudioCanal handles it internationally.

This is the last edition Jose Luis Rebordinos runs

Rebordinos steps down after this year, with Maialen Beloki taking over in January 2027. The festival has been FIAPF Class A since 1957, the acting Silver Shells went gender-neutral in 2021, and last year's edition drew around 2,400 accredited professionals from more than 1,500 companies across 65 countries.

What is still unknown

The Golden Shell, which is announced Saturday and which nobody should be predicting on Friday. Whether any of the other sixteen competition titles also arrived with a premiere behind them — the festival lists origin countries, not premiere histories, and working that out requires checking each one against every festival calendar since Cannes.

A festival that runs a dedicated section for films that premiered somewhere else has put a film that premiered somewhere else into the competition instead, and the preview copy says everything in that competition is a world premiere. Somebody will fix the sentence. The film will still have played three festivals first.