The San Sebastian film festival has announced four Spanish titles for its official selection, which will all compete for the Golden Shell.

All four films are world premieres and all happen to be Catalan productions.

They include multi award-winning veteran director Agusti Villaronga’s post-war drama Black Bread (Pa Negre), starring Sergi Lopez.

Black Bread is based on the popular book of the same name by Catalan author Emili Teixidor about a young boy in post war rural Catalunya who discovers the buried bodies of a father and his son in the woods. His father is then wrongly accused of their murders and so the boy sets out to find the real killers. The impressive cast includes Sergi Lopez (Pan’s Labyrinth, Dirty Pretty Things), Eduard Fernandez (Biutiful) and Laia Marull (Take My Eyes).

Villaronga has been a regular on the major festival circuit for a number of years, with his drama The Sea picking up an award at Berlin in 2000 and El Niño De La Luna featured in competition at Cannes back in 1989. The director has also had two films previously at San Sebastian, In A Glass Cage and Aro Tolbukhin.

Aside from Villaronga’s film there is also Catalan directors Judith Cotell and Jordi Cadena’s drama Elisa K about a young woman named Elisa (played by Aina Clotet) whose troubled past catches up with her. Both Cotell and Cadena have also previously featured films at San Sebastian (53 Winter Days for the former and Los Papeles De Aspern for the latter).

The final two films are Oscar Aibar’s The Great Vazquez, starring Santiago Segura as renowned cartoonist Vazquez who lived life to the full in the 1960s under the Franco dictatorship, and Jose Maria De Orbe’s dark drama Aita about a caretaker who lives in an old abandoned spooky house, which is being produced by Luis Miñarro (co-producer of this year’s Cannes Palme d’Or winner Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives).

More Spanish films in the San Sebastian line-up are expected to be announced soon.

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