By seating Pablo Larraín's four-part Netflix series in the same competition as Mike Leigh's stated final film, San Sebastián has quietly redefined the unit it awards.
When San Sebastián closed out its Official Selection on 28 July, the headline names were exactly the ones a festival built on auteurs would want: Mike Leigh, Pablo Larraín, Nicole García, Benjamín Naishtat, plus first features and world-cinema entries from Japan, Norway and Turkey. The 74th edition runs 18–26 September, tucked behind the Venice–Telluride–Toronto scramble that swallows the early-autumn oxygen. What San Sebastián cannot win on gravity it is trying to win on definition — and the two most talked-about titles in its competition can barely agree on what they are.
Two films, two meanings of the word
Larraín arrives with *My Sad Dead*, a four-episode series he made for Netflix from Mariana Enríquez's short stories, folded into a single competition screening before it streams on 24 September. Leigh arrives with *Tender Loving Care*, a hand-built ensemble drama he has said will very likely be his last film. One is television by manufacture and cinema by invitation; the other is cinema by every old measure and, by its maker's own account, a closing statement. San Sebastián has placed both in front of the same jury, competing for the same Golden Shell, as though the runtime, the platform and the release logic were incidental details rather than the whole argument the rest of the circuit keeps having.
This is not confusion. It is a position. Venice spent this season litigating its open door to Netflix; Cannes still bars the platform from competition on principle. San Sebastián has simply declined to hold the border. Its wager is that the festival, not the format, is what confers the status of cinema — that a work becomes a film by being programmed as one, watched as one, judged as one, whatever server it lands on afterward.
A festival that will seat a streaming series next to a director's farewell is claiming the oldest power it has: not to screen cinema, but to decide what the word covers this year.
It is the same move Locarno made a fortnight ago against the algorithm, pointed at a different enemy. Locarno argued that the room, not the feed, is where discovery happens. San Sebastián is arguing that the room, not the runtime, is where cinema is conferred. Both are festivals too small to set terms by force, reaching instead for the one lever a jury and a screening schedule still hold.
The risk is obvious. Admit the series and you invite the catalogue behind it — the version where a festival becomes a premiere-night service window for platforms that need a laurel more than they need a room. The defence is only as good as the curation, and the proof will be whether Larraín's four hours earn their place beside Leigh's or merely occupy it. But the claim itself is the honest one. San Sebastián has stopped pretending the question is about films and admitted it was always about who gets to say so.