Latido Films has taken international sales on Vanesa Benítez's documentary '200 Lives, Paco Rabal,' bringing the life and career of Spanish screen legend Paco Rabal to worldwide buyers ahead of its 2026 San Sebastián International Film Festival premiere. The Spain-France-Mexico co-production will close the festival's Made in Spain section, where its unusual archive-led approach gives Paco Rabal an intimate role in telling his own story through recordings he made during his lifetime.

At the heart of the documentary is Paco Rabal's own voice. Vanesa Benítez draws on previously unpublished personal material, including cassette tapes on which the actor recorded his memoirs. Combined with images he filmed himself, the recordings allow Paco Rabal, who died in 2001, to reflect on his life, ambitions and contradictions from beyond the grave. Rather than relying only on conventional interviews or a retrospective account, the film builds its portrait around material left behind by the actor himself.

The visual archive is equally revealing. The documentary uses eight films made during Paco Rabal's travels, film shoots and festival appearances, offering a personal view of the world surrounding one of Spain's best-known actors. The archive also includes letters, writings and appearances in newspapers, radio and television. Together, these materials expand the film beyond a standard career biography and connect Paco Rabal's private memories with the cinema history of his era...

READ MORE: 200 Lives, Paco Rabal: Latido Films Takes Sales

Dominik Moll's Riveting Police Procedural Places Good Cop and Bad Cop on Opposite Sides.

Léa Drucker is superb as a dogged inspector investigating an egregious case of riot police misconduct in this starkly effective Cannes competition entry.

"Why does everyone hate the police?" It's a fair and earnest question, lobbed halfway through "Case 137" by 12-year-old Victor (Solan Machado Graner) at his mother Stéphanie (Léa Drucker) - who has a hard time coming up with a satisfactory answer, not least because she's in the police herself. "It's not a likable job," she eventually admits. "Enforcing the law doesn't make you friends." He doesn't know the half of it. Stéphanie is no standard cop, but an investigator in the French IGPN (internal affairs) department, making professional enemies left and right as she investigates various cases of police brutality and misconduct - while outside the force, she finds herself tarred by the same ACAB brush as those she's bringing to account. Not that Dominik Moll's clear-eyed, fuss-free and entirely gripping procedural drama asks viewers to shed any tears for her: Personal integrity ultimately counts for little in service of a crooked institution.

After a few years off the French auteur A-list, Moll enjoyed a surge in acclaim (and swept last year's César Awards) with his 2023 film "The Night of the 12th" - an ostensibly straightforward true-crime policier that revealed more intricately ambiguous moral layers as it unfolded. It was a more sober and stringent genre exercise than the playful Hitchcock homages with which he made his name in the early 2000s, and the change evidently agreed with him. "Case 137," premiering as Moll's first Cannes competition entry since 2005's "Lemming," ventures even more tautly into pure procedural territory, probing one fictional (but compositely fact-inspired) case involving corrupt Search and Investigation Brigade (or BRI) officers to the very bitter end, with little in the way of sensationalism or sentimentality, but a surprisingly pointed sidebar on cat videos.

By Guy Lodge. Variety

READ MORE: 'Case 137' Review: Dominik Moll's Riveting Police Procedural

"Yes, they would execute a child": the film about a girl who has to bake a birthday cake for Saddam Hussein

Warm, funny and heartbreaking, The President's Cake tells the story of a brutal ruler and a girl forced to make him a present in a time of sanctions-induced hardship. Its Iraqi director Hasan Hadi remembers his own fearful childhood

There were no cinemas in Iraq in the 1990s, when Hasan Hadi was growing up under Saddam Hussein's regime. But he still managed to fall in love with films - after a family member roped him into helping her distribute VHS tapes of banned foreign movies. "I was a kid," says the 37-year-old, "so no one would suspect me of smuggling. I'd put the tapes up my shirt or in my bag."

Hadi started secretly watching the films, too, everything from Bruce Lee to Tarkovsky. At night, he crept into the living room after everyone had gone to bed, keeping the volume low in case his family woke up.

How, I ask, would the authorities have punished you if you'd been caught in possession of banned films? Hadi pauses. "It depends. There were no specific rules. But if it was a political film, or something really forbidden by the regime, it could go to execution." They would execute a child? Hadi nods. "We're talking about a period when childhood lost its innocence."

Hadi's own film, The President's Cake, is about to be released. Warm, funny and sometimes heartbreakingly sad, it perfectly captures the innocence of childhood. The setting is early 1990s Iraq: Saddam's brutal rule and the hardship of sanctions are seen through the eyes of a nine-year-old girl called Lamia, played by Baneen Ahmed Nayyef, with her pet cockerel. She is the unluckiest kid in class, her name having been picked out of a hat, meaning she has to make a cake for the president's birthday - a compulsory national holiday in Iraq...

BY Cath Clarke

READ MORE: 'Yes, they would execute a child': the film about a girl who has to bake a birthday cake for Saddam Hussein | Film | The Guardian

Shih-Ching Tsou and frequent collaborator Anora's Oscar-winning auteur Sean Baker have created an affecting and original film of both humor and pathos.

There are few things in a culture as ridiculous and potent as its superstitions. Left-Handed Girl's I-Jing, a sweet five-year-old who has just moved back to Taipei with her mom and older sister, gets literal firsthand experience when her grandpa admonishes her for using her left hand for everything - it's not natural; it's the devil at work, he says.

When I-Jing stares at her appendage with dismay, so begins a new relationship between her and her devil hand as she navigates city life. Shooting entirely with iPhones, debut solo director and co-writer Shih-Ching Tsou (the other co-writer is Tsou's frequent collaborator, Anora's Sean Baker) summons the frenetic energy and sensory experience of Taipei. There are bright red Chinese characters overtaking the glass windows of a pawn shop; the pleasant melody of trash-collecting trucks; the easy ping-pong of Mandarin and Taiwanese between generations; lush trees against grimy buildings that can nearly make you smell the specific essence of a bustling, wetter city. It's not so much a love letter from a fan as it is a devotional to a place known by heart. Tsou pairs the kaleidoscopic fragments of the city with the splinters of imperfect people - poignantly and tenderly showing what it means to be a family in Taiwan, and delivering a triumph of a film...

READ MORE: Left-Handed Girl review - striking Taiwanese family drama is a real marvel | Sean Baker | The Guardian

A year on from his "platform" film, Nuovo Olimpo [+], which was an impassioned homage to films released exclusively on Netflix, Ferzan Ozpetek is bringing his stories, characters and emotions back to the big screen with his new feature film, Diamanti [+], which is hitting over 400 Italian cinemas from 19 December, courtesy of Vision Distribution. A Christmas film with all the trimmings, it's a genuine crowd-pleaser, deploying a cast of successful actresses (18, in all) and set in its entirety in one of the most sparkly and colourful places imaginable: a prestigious dressmaker's shop for the film and theatre world in 1970s Rome.

As often happens with the Turkish-Italian director, there's also an autobiographical impetus behind this his 15th film. On this occasion, Ozpetek goes back to the early '80s when he worked as an assistant director and frequented film and theatre dressmakers, meeting the greatest costume designers, director and actors of the period, against a backdrop of mannequins, sewing machines and fabric scraps. That said, the film opens in the present-day: gathered around the usual, sumptuously decked table is a group of women whose faces we progressively recognise. They're famous actresses who have all starred in the director's previous films: Luisa Ranieri, Jasmine Trinca, Nicole Grimaudo, Paola Minaccioni, Elena Sofia Ricci, Lunetta Savino, Aurora Giovinazzo, Milena Vukotic, Carla Signoris, Anna Ferzetti and Loredana Cannata, in addition to new entries Vanessa Scalera, Geppi Cucciari, Milena Mancini, Sara Bosi and Mara Venier. They've been called together by Ozpetek himself, who's appearing in one of his films for the very first time, developing his next work alongside them...

by Vittoria Scarpa

READ MORE: Review: Diamanti - Cineuropa

Three Kilometres to the End of the World review - brutal self-denial in deepest Romania.

Cannes film festival
A drama of despair plays out in a remote village, as a debt-ridden father is mortified to discover his son is gay.

Here is a self-laceratingly painful tale of repression and denial in a remote Romanian village in the Danube delta, directed by Emanuel Parvu. It's in the gimlet-eyed observational and satirical style of the new Romanian cinema, a kind of movie-making that in extended dialogue scenes seeks out the bland bureaucratic language of the police and church authorities; their evasive mannerisms, their reactionary worldviews and lifelong habits of indicating opinions in quiet voices and in code, things they don't want to be held responsible for, and for things they want to keep enclosed in silence.

The drama concerns a careworn guy, Dragoi (Bogdan Dumitrache), who owes money to a local tough guy and is badly behind with the debt. Then he discovers that his 17-year-old son Adi (Ciprian Chiujdea), the apple of his eye - whom he is planning to send to military school next year, and whom he fondly imagines to be dating a local girl - has been badly beaten up by the money-lender's sons. With icy rage, Dragoi takes this to be the man's unforgivably violent way of demanding his money...

By Peter Bradshaw

READ MORE: Three Kilometres to the End of the World review - brutal self-denial in deepest Romania | Film | The Guardian

Daybreak in summer. A young girl from San Sebastian makes her way to the Peine del Viento (Wind Comb). She remembers the old sculptor Eduardo Chillida, who had been coming here since he was a boy. Today his three sculptures anchored to the rocks, in permanent conversation with the sea and the wind, have become a distinguishing feature of his city and of the whole Basque coast. At dawn, the young Jone asks herself about the sculptor and promises herself that she will go and find him.