UK director James Marsh’s literary biopic Dance First, starring Gabriel Byrne as iconic Irish writer Samuel Beckett, will close the 71st San Sebastian Film Festival.
The film is sold by London and Paris-based Film Constellation.
As per its synopsis, the biopic touches on various phases in Beckett’s life from “Parisian bon vivant, to World War II Resistance fighter, Nobel Prize-winning playwright, philandering husband and recluse.”
Its focus, however, is on Beckett’s reaction to winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969, which was a turning point in his life as he grappled with his own inner demons.
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Byrne is joined in the cast by French actress Sandrine Bonnaire as Beckett’s wife.
Marsh has a long relationship with San Sebastian.
His Academy Award-winning documentary for Man on Wire (2009), directed with Simon Chinn, played at the festival in 2008.
Prior to that his early work Wisconsin Death Trip screened in the Perlak section in 1999 and won a FIPRESCI Prize Special Mention.
Subsequent credits included The King (2005), Shadow Dancer (2012) and The Theory of Everything (2104).
Byrne previously attended San Sebastian with Joel Coen’s 1990 Silver Shell winner Miller’s Crossing and Costa Gavras’ Capital in 2012.
The San Sebastian Film Festival runs from September 23 to 30.
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