Catalonia’s New Generation Raises Its Game as Ambition, Scale and Genre Drive Bolder Arthouse and Crossover Titles

Over 2019-25, annual Catalan government general cinema funding soared from €12.5 million ($14.4 million) in 2019 to €30.2 million ($34.8 million) in just specific support lines.

Now, however, the films that are being made are also getting bigger, as a new generation of filmmakers and TV creatives emerged over the last decade raise their game in their artistic ambitions and production values.

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New movies at San Sebastián from rapidly consolidating Catalan or Catalonia-based writers and directors is a case in point.

Mikel Gurrea’s main competition player “Saints,” for example, launches as a mini visual mystery thriller. Distant lights – maybe car lights or fireflies – dance across a pitch-black night scene. They are finally revealed as the head-lamps of a gang of thieves, robbing a church, caught closer up, their faces occasionally emerging from the gloom.

Cleverly, in visual terms, not dialog, Gurrea not just launches the film but anticipates its focus: This is an identity drama, this focus becoming how late-20s Lali establishes her priorities, between a chosen family – an elite band of church artefacts thieves – and her biological family, her dying mother.

“Saints’” budget is “roughly twice” that of “Suro,” Gurrea’s 2022 debut which also competed at San Sebastián, says “Saints” producer Laura Rubirola Salas. That budget spike can be put down to spiraling production costs and a film “more complex in terms of locations, number of characters and overall production values,” she adds.

Written and starring Berto Romero, “5 More Minutes” delivers a reportedly excruciatingly comedic sci-fi thriller as an on-the-rocks couple are caught in a time loop at a rural getaway.

Suddenly, a world of normal multi-shot set-ups morphs into one of millimetrically calculated five-minute sequence shots, film at the same time of 6.35 p.m. to achieve similar light conditions. None of which as an easy task.

2018’s “Land of Loneliness” (“Con el viento”), Meritxell Colell’s first fiction feature, unspooled in a Spanish village. Her third, “Far From the Trees,” one of Locarno biggest winners this August, begins in the Amazon jungle, so0n moves to Peru’s highlands, following Adela, a sound artist recording endangered languages.

The locations can be eye-catching. What quickly dazzles, however, is an intricate mix of present and past, collective and personal memory, of the archive footage of the Catalan diaspora after the Spanish Civil War and scenes of Adela as a child, and a present in a film which speaks about family, forced exile, roots, memory and identity.

Why the Step-Up in Ambition?

Aiming to raise the ante in style and scale, cineastes are emboldened by success, theirs and of others.

Over the last decade, Catalan productions have won Best First Feature (“Summer 1993”), a Golden Bear (Alcarràs,” also from Carla Simón) and Best Leading Performance (“20,000 Species of Bees”) at the Berlin Film Festival.

“Sirāt” took a Cannes Jury Prize last year, and two Academy Award nominations. Smaller films have also triumphed: “The Good Daughter,” now playing at San Sebastián, scooped top prizes at Tallinn Black Nights Festival, last year; “Forastera,” directed by Lucía Aleñar Iglesias, won a Fipresci Prize at 2025’s Toronto.

In a more commercial way of things, Paramount Pictures is giving a theatrical release to “Tad and the Magic Lamp,” part of the animated movie series, in over 40 international territories, including nearly all major markets around the world, notes producer Edmon Roch.

Another film he co-produced, Aina Clotet’s “Alive” (“Viva”), now at San Sebastián, won the 2026 Cannes Critics’ Week’s Louis Roederer Foundation Rising Star Award.

“Nobody sets out to make a bigger film, that isn’t the place we create from,” says Colell. So she wrote “Far from the Trees” “freely, without thinking if the film could be made, pouring in cinematographic, emotional and narratives desires.”

That said, she is “less afraid of taking risks” thanks to a growing confidence of her own capacities and those of key collaborators, such as editor Ana Pfaff, who has also edited Clara Simón’s films including the sensational short “Flamenco,” set to screen at San Sebastián.

“Suro’s”success gave us the confidence to make a film that could once again compete in the Official Selection of a major festival like San Sebastián, and travel internationally without any complexes. I feel this is something we question less and less,” Rubirola Salas says, talking about Gurrea’s debut.

Also, the money’s there. In 2025, Spain produced 435 features, more than any other country in Europe. That speaks large, in part, to the emergence of consolidated regional firm industries such as Catalonia’s.

But Spain’s regions do not finance films on their own. “Far From the Trees” worked a “fundamental” national-regional axis, says Colell, tapping finance from Spain’s national ICAA film agency and the Catalan Government ICEC.

“5 More Minutes” benefitted from co-production by Movistar Plus, the biggest Spanish pay TV/SVOD operator, which set out from its first announced slate in 2023 to make auteur event movies at budgets competitive with similar movies in , say, France.

Spain, and most especially Catalonia, which boasts a minority co-production fund, furthermore ranks with Belgium among the easiest of co-producer partner countries in Europe.

And success breeds success. The relationship between Lastor Media and Italy’s Kino Produzioni, forged on “Alcarràs,” now both producers on “Saints,” has been “key to expanding our financing capacity,” says Rubirola Salas.

Also, in producing more original films, which push the envelope on narrative or visuals, filmmakers are making a virtue out of a market necessity. Bolder films made at higher production standards is one way to stand out from the crowd.

“Films have to be very competitive these days. We are releasing them in the same conditions as the rest of the films in the world. Filmmakers realize that it’s not enough to just have good ideas,. They also need great ambitions and to show them,” says Roch.

That includes first-time feature directors. Roch cites “Alive” (“Viva”), made by Clotet, bulwarked in confidence by her breakout groundbreaking international TV co-production “This Is Not Sweden.” An issue-blender, it turns on Nora, 40, who plunges into a relationship with a much younger man. Also, she faces possibly recurrent breast cancer and a world desiccated by global warming.

Another case in point, Roch says, is “5 More Minutes.” Romero had just made for Movistar Plus the TV series hit “The Other Side,” which confirmed his ability to juggle genre – there horror, comedy and a thriller propulsion. Movistar Plus was “very comfortable with Berto making a first feature, was with us from the very start and made it possible for us to have the elements we needed to make it,” says Roch. “The idea is to get great stories and then just power them up across the board in all their different elements to have international stories that they can travel very well.”