No todo es vigilia by the Spanish director Hermes Paralluelo is receiving its world premiere here in San Sebastián. The director reveals that he cast his own grandparents in the leading roles because, as he says, “I wanted to tell a story about an old couple and to familiarize myself with the subject I began to film my grandparents, and I immediately realized that filming them was what I really wanted to do.”

Although he had always been really close to them, he admits that this film enabled him to see them from another perspective. “I could approach them aesthetically.”

Los tontos y los estupidos is another Spanish film being screened in the New Directors section that was originally going to be a conventional project but which the financial crisis meant had to be stripped down to its most basic elements: a group of actors get together on a film set to read/rehearse/ tell/live the tale of The Silly and the Stupid.