A leading group of Spanish women film-makers condemned the San Sebastián film festival’s decision to award Johnny Depp its highest honour, saying it gave the international event a bad name.
Cristina Andreu, the president of Spain’s Association of Female Filmmakers and Audiovisual Media, said she was “very surprised” by the decision to award Depp the Donostia award at the festival’s 69th edition in September. The award is the event’s top prize and aims to honour lifetime achievement. “This speaks very badly of the festival and its leadership, and transmits a terrible message to the public: ‘It doesn’t matter if you are an abuser as long as you are a good actor’,” Andreu told the Associated Press.
Andreu added that the association, which has close links to the San Sebastian festival, was “studying next steps”.
In a statement on its website, the San Sebastián festival, based in the Basque resort town, praised Depp as “one of contemporary cinema’s most talented and versatile actors”. Previous recipients of the Donostia award include Viggo Mortensen, Penélope Cruz and Judi Dench.
The Karlovy Vary international film festival in the Czech Republic also announced plans to “honour” Depp at its upcoming event in August.
In their glowing website citations, neither festival makes mention of the scandal currently engulfing Depp’s career, following the actor’s loss in a libel case against the publisher of the Sun newspaper in which the high court concluded he had assaulted his former wife Amber Heard on multiple occasions. The actor’s most recent film, the Japan-set drama Minamata, has yet to be released in the US, resulting in a claim by its director Andrew Levitas that Hollywood studio MGM wanted to “bury” the film. Depp was also asked to step down from his role as Gellert Grindelwald in the third Fantastic Beasts film, and has been replaced by Mads Mikkelsen.
In an earlier show of defiance over film industry figures shunned in the US, San Sebastián chose to allow Woody Allen’s most recent film, Rifkin’s Festival, to be shot at the festival, and then selected it as the opening event of its 2020 edition. This followed Allen’s legal dispute with his former backers, Amazon, over claims Allen had “sabotaged” the marketability of earlier films with his comments about sex abuse accusations by his daughter Dylan Farrow and the #MeToo campaign. The dispute was settled out of court.
San Sebastián film festival has been contacted by the Guardian for comment.