Festivals usually entrust awards to established professionals; at San Sebastian, a jury of 150 young people has a voice of its own. During the 74th edition, which opened on 18 September 2026, members aged 18 to 25 rate films competing for the DAMA Youth Award after each screening. Twenty-one feature films are eligible. They come from New Directors and, where they are first or second features, Horizontes Latinos. The festival explained the arrangement on 17 September, before screenings began. The award is due to be presented on 26 September, so there is no winner to celebrate yet. The news is the creation of a critical space for one generation of viewers looking at another generation of filmmakers in the making.
A vote after every film
The announced procedure is straightforward: 150 jurors give each work a score after its screening. Ratings and the ranking of favourites are updated daily through the festival’s official media. That pace gives audiences a window onto the films’ reception during the event without turning an interim table into a final verdict. A film seen early may hold attention longer; another may change the conversation at the last moment. The result will be known only when the process ends. The 26 September ceremony is expected to include a DAMA representative, a figure from the film world and two members of the Youth Jury.
This prize should not be confused with the festival’s other distinctions. A Donostia Award honours a career; awards for the sections and official competition have their own rules. Here the voters do not replace professional juries. Their role is to show how a young audience reads films often still at the beginning of their international lives. A judgment may respond to daring form, a story close to the jurors’ concerns or an unexpected discovery. The festival has published no single aesthetic doctrine for the 150 people to follow. That plurality is exactly what makes their ranking worth watching.
New voices on both sides of the screen
The 21 candidates include all New Directors films and the first or second features presented in Horizontes Latinos. The two sections have different purposes. New Directors centres on filmmakers at the start of their feature careers, while Horizontes Latinos opens a window onto films connected to Latin America. Bringing them together for the DAMA award does not erase their production histories or languages. Instead, it asks jurors to consider work from different circuits and traditions. The prize is not a contest between continents but a way to give greater visibility to films still finding their audiences.
The Horizontes Latinos programme illustrates that circulation. Its official page, for example, lists Valentina Maurel’s Siempre soy tu animal materno / Forever Your Maternal Animal as the section’s opening film. That fact helps convey the range of the programme. It does not on its own establish that this particular film is among the 21 Youth Award candidates, whose specific eligibility rule applies to first and second features. Such care prevents a section’s line-up from being mistaken for an award shortlist. Interested viewers should consult the programme and the official ranking as it is updated during the festival.
Why DAMA backs the award
DAMA is a Spanish collective rights-management organization for audiovisual creators, including directors and screenwriters. It is sponsoring the Youth Award for the third consecutive year. According to the festival, DAMA president Virginia Yagüe sees the initiative as a way to foster enthusiasm for film and perhaps future vocations among the jurors. A route from viewer to profession is not automatic: not everyone who votes will become an author. But being invited to explain preferences, see different forms of cinema and compare impressions can encourage a more active film culture.
An authors’ rights organization also has reason to want younger generations to recognize the people who write and direct works, not only the performers on screen. DAMA’s involvement is a reminder that films exist within an ecosystem of creation, remuneration and distribution. It must not obscure jurors’ independence. The prize’s value rests on the sincerity of their votes, not on the promotional usefulness of a story about young people loving cinema. The festival has supplied no evidence of the award’s career impact for this year’s selected filmmakers, so any claim about that would be premature.
Another story about the festival
Opening nights, stars and tributes understandably draw attention. Yet a festival’s identity is also built in less visible screenings, when films without an established reputation meet viewers willing to discover them. A youth jury guarantees neither boldness nor fairness in every vote. It does create an opportunity to see what 150 spectators of the same age range, but necessarily different tastes, choose to foreground. The daily ranking can start a conversation. It should not trap the works in a race for scores that leaves their individual character behind.
For B-EMPIRE, the issue this year is clear: watch how a major festival shares the power to confer recognition with those who will be tomorrow’s audiences and perhaps its filmmakers. The confirmed facts are the number and age of jurors, the 21 eligible films, the rating system and the award date. The result remains open until 26 September. Meanwhile, the DAMA Youth Award asks viewers to see first films for what they attempt today, not merely as predictable steps in careers that have not yet been written.