The San Sebastián Film Festival will host a 20-film retrospective celebrating José Giovanni, the French director, screenwriter and novelist who helped define postwar French crime cinema, known as "polar". The programme, running during the festival's 74th edition, will cover films released between 1960 and 2001, showcasing almost the entirety of Giovanni's directing career alongside screenplays he wrote for major auteurs such as Jacques Becker and Jean-Pierre Melville.

The retrospective includes 15 features Giovanni directed himself, beginning with his 1967 debut "Law of Survival", plus eight screenplays written for other filmmakers, including "The Hole" (based on his own prison experiences), "The Big Risk" and "Second Wind". Giovanni, born Joseph Antoine Roger Damiani in Paris in 1923, drew heavily on his own turbulent life, having been sentenced to death for murder before his punishment was commuted to hard labour. The event, organised with the Basque Film Archive and Spanish Film Archive, will also feature a bilingual study of his work.