Woody Allen’s new film “Rifkin’s Festival” will open the 68th annual San Sebastian Film Festival in September, organizers of the Spanish festival announced Thursday.
The romantic comedy, written and directed by Allen, stars Elena Anaya (“Wonder Woman”), Louis Garrel (“An Officer and a Spy”), Gina Gershon (“The Insider”), Sergi López (“Pan’s Labyrinth”), Wallace Shawn (“Marriage Story”) and Christoph Waltz (“Inglourious Basterds”).
Allen shot the film last summer in and around San Sebastian, a town located in the mountainous Basque region of northern Spain. The story follows a married American couple who go to the San Sebastian Festival and get caught up in the magic of the event, the beauty and charm of the city and the fantasy of movies. She has an affair with a brilliant French movie director, and he falls in love with a beautiful Spanish woman who lives there.
Mediapro Studio, Gravier Productions and Wildside produced the film, which is the first Allen film since 2004’s “Melinda and Melinda” to open at San Sebastian. The premiere is set for Sept. 18 in the city’s Kursaal Auditorium. The festival runs through Sept. 26.
The film will be distributed in Spain by TriPictures, and the Mediapro Studio Distribution will look after its international sales.
Finding U.S. distribution for the film may be more problematic. Allen’s standing as a filmmaker has fallen since his daughter Dylan Farrow resurfaced accusations that he molested her in the early 1990s when she was 7. Amazon Studios dropped plans for the 2018 release of the Timothée Chalamet-Elle Fanning romance “A Rainy Day in New York” and returned U.S. rights to Allen last year. That film still has not premiered in the U.S.
Allen, who was never charged with a crime after two separate police investigations in the 1990s, has repeatedly called the accusations a “total fabrication,” including in a new memoir “Apropos of Nothing” published earlier this year.