French actress Juliette Binoche is set to receive the Donostia Award at the San Sebastian Festival, which runs from September 16 to 24. She also graces the official poster for the festival’s 70th edition.
San Sebastian’s director, José Luis Rebordinos, announced at a press conference in the city that Binoche will accept the Donostia honor during a gala at the Kursaal Conference Center. The event will include a screening of Avec amour et acharnement (Fire), a film directed by Claire Denis that earned the Silver Bear for Best Director at the recent Berlin Film Festival.
Binoche, who rose to international fame with an Oscar-winning performance in The English Patient, will visit San Sebastian for a fourth time to receive one of this year’s Donostia Awards. Her career spans roughly 75 roles, ranging from powerful heroines to vulnerable figures, across historical figures, dramatic turns, and comic moments.
Dimension, the San Sebastian-based company responsible for creating this year’s posters, used a portrait of Binoche shot by Brigitte Lacombe to design the official 70th edition poster featuring the actress.
The other festival posters in various sections pay tribute to the look and the many ways of seeing life and cinema, as announced by Rebordinos. The Basque cinema section, Zinemira, will present its own poster for the first time, part of a collection of images meant to honor the different gazes on life and cinema. As Dimension’s president Guille Viglione notes, cinema is a way of looking; a director shapes a filtered reality with their gaze, the audience broadens its view of the world, and actors communicate the essence of their characters to the camera.
“In these messy times, the more we pretend to see, the less time we have to observe. Pausing to look at something is how we learn to appreciate it,” Viglione added.
Binoche, born in Paris in 1964, began her film career with Liberty Belle (1983) and soon worked with notable directors such as Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Doillon, and André Techiné, whose paths intersected again in Alice et Martin (1998). The iconic Mauvais sang (Bad Blood, 1986) marked a pivotal collaboration with Leos Carax, who later directed Les amants du Pont-Neuf (The Lovers on the Pont-Neuf, 1991) for which Binoche also contributed.
Early in her career she balanced French projects with English-language works, including Philip Kaufman’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988) and Peter Kosminsky’s Wuthering Heights (1992). She also appeared in Louis Malle’s Damage (1992), alongside stars like Daniel Day-Lewis, Ralph Fiennes, and Jeremy Irons, delivering performances that propelled her onto the world stage.
Binoche’s portrayal of a grieving nurse in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Trois couleurs: Bleu earned her Best Actress and César Award at Venice, and she would go on to receive multiple honors across her career. She portrayed George Sand in Les enfants du siècle (1999) and gained international recognition for The English Patient (1996), which earned her the Best Supporting Actress Oscar and brought Berlin’s Best Actress accolades as well.
Her collaborations span European cinema with directors like Jean-Paul Rappeneau, Chantal Akerman, Patrice Leconte, Lasse Hallström, John Boorman, and Michael Haneke. These partnerships include acclaimed titles in competition and outside the festival’s primary sections, including Kieslowski’s influence on the festival’s programming and the broader European art-house landscape.
Filmography highlights beyond those earlier years include Mary (2005), The Flight of the Red Balloon (2007), and collaborations with Abbas Kiarostami such as Copie conforme (Certified Copy, 2010), a romantic drama set in Tuscany that earned Binoche Best Actress at Cannes. More recent work features Hirokazu Kore-eda’s The Truth (2019) and Ouistreham (On a Leve at Normandy), with the latter marking another notable visit to San Sebastian by the renowned actress and continuing recognition from audiences and critics alike.
Notes: This article compiles contemporary information from festival announcements and public statements surrounding Binoche’s Donostia Award and related festival posters. Citations: festival organizers and industry press reports. [Attribution: San Sebastian Festival press briefing, official poster announcement, Dimension gallery remarks].