Portuguese Inês Nunes won the Casa Wabi-Escine award at the 74th edition of the San Sebastián Festival in Spain, with the film “The Spirit Healer is Away for the Weekend”, which gives entitlement to an artistic residence in Mexico.
© Frank Molter/picture alliance via Getty Images
26/09/2026
by
Lusa
O the prize consists of a five-week artistic residence at Casa Wabi in Puerto Escondido, Mexico, for directors who are developing their first or second feature film.
The maximum prize for the Basque festival was for the British film "Tender Loving Care", by director Mike Leigh, winning the Golden Shell in San Sebastián, as well as the Jury Award for best argument, written by Leigh himself.
The film of the British filmmaker also won the Silver Shell for best main performance for actress Kate O’Flynn, a split award (“ex aequo”) with Asta Kamma August for her role in “Markens grøde” / “Growth of the Soil” (a coproduction between Norway, Denmark and Germany).
In addition, this work by Hans Petter Moland raised the Jury Award for Best Picture for Oskar Dahlsbakken.
The synopsis of “The Spirit Healer is Away for the Weekend” refers to how, in “every summer, the inhabitants of a coastal location witness an expected ritual: luxury cars circulate at great speed at dawn, measuring the pulse of the annual economy”.
“The heat and saturation push the places to the air-conditioned refuge of the shopping center. Inside, two women: Sharon, persecuted by her daughter's ghost, and Celeste, a young woman marked by a major road accident, without knowing it, seek each other ", adds the text.
Cited in the communiqué of the organization of the film festival at the time of its choice for San Sebastián, Inês Nunes stressed that all life attended the same “show”: “All summers, a human current flows into the Algarve, redoing the territory, its rhythms and hierarchies. While the newcomers have fun, the locals work. So close and so far from the sea, we often find ourselves confined to the shopping center, refuge, prison and the main setting of my summers”.
“A place that promised modernity and future, but today represents a melancholy vestige of an idea of progress never fulfilled,” wrote the director.
Last year, Inês Nunes’ short film “The Loneliness of Lizards” won the award for best short film in the Nest section of the San Sebastián International Festival for film by film students.
Born in Tavira and graduated in Accomplishment from the Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema, in 2015, Inês Nunes received a scholarship from the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian to do his master's degree at Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola, in San Sebastián.