What do you do if you don’t go to the Summit of the Future?

Of course, you go to the San Sebastian Film Festival!

This is the first year since I think 2009 that I haven’t been in New York for the High-Level week at the UN and whatever associated events are happening.

This year it’s the Summit of the Future and the AMR Summit and of course Climate Week. Although I think the work around AMR has been great with a lot of the recommendations from the report chaired by Mai Motley it isn’t an area, I have done much work on since 2015. I didn’t have a reason to attend the New York meetings for that. The Summit of the Future is a huge, missed opportunity to address the much larger governance issues around new technology that are emerging. If you are interested in this area, I do suggest grabbing a copy of my book Tomorrow’s People and New Technology. The book looks at nine disruptive industries and how they impact on delivering the 2030 agenda and the Paris Agreement looking through the use of these technologies in our homes, travel, jobs, health education and social life.

So, for me the Summit of the Future didn’t offer an opportunity to address the key issues I was interested in and I am not a conference tourist so I found myself with an opportunity that I was very excited about – I could go and enjoy myself at the San Sebastian film festival again.

I used to live in San Sebastian and attend the festival from 2004 to 2009 and sometimes blog about the films. In those days there was a political section which addressed in different years issues of gender, migration, environment, and other key issues that I had an interest in. I even worked with the film festival and the UN on a possible green section of the festival around the twenty-year anniversary of the Brundtland Report. Unfortunately, we ran out of time, but it would have been great – unlike other green festivals we were planning to focus on feature films and not documentaries and were planning a winner for each year since the Brundtland report and then an overall winner. It would also have had a competition with the BBC website on a youth competition with them the competitors producing a 1-minute environment video.

This year I had put in a student short film produced by Arizona State University on Beyond Fast Fashion which we had shown at the UN Environment Assembly in February for competition, but it wasn’t selected.

I decided to go anywhere after all San Sebastian is a beautiful place – do google it – it has the best food in the world and I hadn’t been back for seven years so a great chance to catch up with old friends and see some films, have wonderful coffee and did I mention the amazing food?

The film festival released the tickets in batches of two days which is understandable but not as easy for me as I was six hours behind San Sebastian coming back from UNEP’s One Planet Network Conference in Rio.

If you aren’t aware of the work UNEP is doing here on Sustainable Consumption and Production do look up the network, there is some great work there.  The six-hour delay did mean I missed a few films that I would like to go to but in the end, I secured tickets for 90% of what I had hoped to see.

Being shown is a great cartoon coming out Wild Robots which the trailer for definitely sparked my interest, I signed for a couple of short film sections, but the rest is an Italian Retrospective. I haven’t watched any major Italian films and so this was a great opportunity to delve in. I used to go to film Noir festivals and many of the films fall into that theme. As the films are from 1943 onwards they deal with living under fascism, the emergence of the influence of the mafia in post WWII Italy and terrorism. There are 22 films in the retrospective I maned to secure tickets for the following – the problem of being six hours behind when the films are released!

The city stands trial. The judge tasked with solving the murder of a respectable citizen from Naples discovers that the victim belonged to an extensive criminal network. The judge wavers between his duty, his principles and the strong pressure meted out by the political authorities and the upper-crust. Based on true cases of the struggle against Neapolitan organised crime.

Execution squad: An organised group kills notorious criminals who have never been tried and inspector Bertone is given the task of catching this clique of avengers. A clever analysis of the conventions and limits of the legal system made parallel to a number of movies of a similar nature shot in Hollywood. Silver Shell for Best Director at San Sebastian in 1972.

The iron prefect: In 1925, Mussolini sent Cesare Mori to Sicily to occupy the position of Prefect. His mission was to fight the Mafia. The fascist regime was worried about its power and influence, and the next four years went down in history as the time of the Iron Prefect, who arrested and sentenced more than two thousand mobsters. Based on a true case of the struggle against the Sicilian Mafia.

Revolver: Kidnappers have snatched the wife of a prison warden, played by the homeric Oliver Reed. She'll be killed if they don't release the prisoner embodied by Fabio Testi. Eventually the warden and the prisoner are thrown into an unlikely conspiracy when the latter realises that his former gang plans to get rid of him. Poliziesco with the music of Ennio Morricone, programmed in collaboration with the Sitges Festival.

Escape to France: At the end of World War II, a fascist criminal with an arrest warrant on his head tries to make an undercover escape to France with his son. When the train they are travelling on makes a stop and they are about to have dinner in a restaurant, he is recognised by the waitress.

The tough ones: A Roman police commissioner witnesses how arrested criminals avoid jail by invoking an assortment of legal dodges. The only solution for him is to become an angel of death. The film unites four of the heavyweights in the genre (the actors Tomas Milian and Maurizio Merli, the director Umberto Lenzi and the screenwriter Dardano Sacchetti) while entertaining a themed dialogue with another title in the season: La polizia ringrazia.

Obsession: Giovanna is a young woman married to an older restaurant owner. Her sordid life changes with the appearance of a tramp who becomes her lover and urges her to kill her husband. Neorrealist adaptation of James M. Cain's novel The Postman Always Rings Twice.

In the name of the law: A young judge is sent to the small Sicilian town of Capodarso. His mission will be to apply the law in a community accustomed to operating according to the Mafia rules and to living in a permanent state of insecurity. He soon realises that he's on his own and that the locals are not about to collaborate. Based on a magistrate's autobiographical novel.

So, while many of my friends will be in New York talking Summit of the Future or attending Climate Week or the AMR Summit I will be sipping coffee and red wine having Pintxos, overlooking beautiful beaches and watching great films.