Before this Saturday, 15 of the 75 films that earned the Golden Oyster award were Spanish, and all were directed by men. This statistic reflects a history where festival lineups, like many in the industry, offered limited opportunities for female directors. Yet the scene is shifting, and the festival’s efforts to correct that bias are evident. When discussing San Sebastián native Jaione Camborda’s triumph this evening with her second feature, O Corno, one must acknowledge the festival’s commitment to widening representation among its prize winners.
Across the competition, the slate of films directed by women that year was curated by a jury that was largely female, chaired by Claire Denis, the renowned French filmmaker who has long borne witness to the challenges faced by women behind the camera. The presence of women in leadership roles among the jurors is a meaningful signal, yet it does not automatically translate into a wholesale read of the artistic values upheld by the festival. The Golden Shell, while significant, is not the sole measure of merit.
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O Corno unfolds in Galicia on Arosa Island. The story follows a midwife who must flee to Portugal after helping a teenager obtain an abortion. Along her journey, she encounters a constellation of women who offer support and protection. Camborda’s staging of sisterhood is a showcase of her talent for portraying the human form in motion, a strength she already demonstrated in her earlier work Arima. A nearly ten-minute sequence stands out where a birth scene unfolds with a heightened emotional intensity, underscoring her knack for moving between genres and tones with ease.
A still from O Como accompanies this discussion.
O Corno functions as a tapestry of genres. It probes feminine attitudes toward motherhood, builds a narrative that maintains tension while incorporating road movie elements and Western touches, and most notably argues for women’s rights to make decisions about their own bodies. The film is set in a period after the Franco regime formally ended, when new legal and social debates began to reshape Spanish life, and it resonates with ongoing battles to protect reproductive choice in the present day.
Claire Denis reflects on a career spent at festivals that historically favored films by men, which helps explain why many of the other major awards announced that evening went to male directors. The program also spotlighted feminist fictions led or overseen by women. The Special Jury Prize, the second-highest honor, went to Danish filmmaker Isabella Eklöf for Kalak, a work that examines the lasting damage caused by patriarchal masculinity through the portrait of a man shaped by sexual abuse in his childhood. The Best Directing award recognized the joint effort of a woman and a non-binary director, Tzu-Hui Peng and Ping-Wen Wang, for the Taiwanese drama A Journey in Spring, which follows a man trying to repair family ties after the death of his wife and his own sexist biases. The Argentine comedy Point, co-directed by María Alché and Benjamín Naishtat, earned both Best Screenplay and Best Leading Performance for Marcelo Subiotto, who shared the ex aequo prize with the lead actor. The film The Great Absence sparked discussion around the topic of female autonomy, and its dialogue resonated with broader conversations on women’s rights. In another moment of recognition, Hovik Keuchkerian received the Best Supporting Performance Award for his portrayal of a man grappling with masculine pressures in Isabel Coixet’s Un amor. The festival’s choices have sparked dialogue about feminism and the ways contemporary cinema can elevate these concerns.