When I returned to San Sebastian after three long decades, the question of my friends and acquaintances was fundamental to see what changes were enhancing the city.

I responded that the biggest change I found in the linguistic landscape. Precisely, unlike what happened at that time, I listened and saw the Basque in general and without having to make any special effort. Other architectural and urban changes he had been acquiring, as he had seen in images the new buildings of the city and the road knots that narrowed the city.

As for the billboard, although I realised that there were only a few cinemas left in San Sebastian, I did not think this was important until the year 69. I was immersed in the Film Festival until I realized that fundamental change the film has undergone.

When I left San Sebastian, where today the cubes of Moneo are built, to shame those who gave importance to the elegance of the city, there was only a large plot surrounded by fences for many years.

Before the site a casino called Grand Kursaal was built in 1921. The German word Kursaal means etymologically a room or place for care, and it was a building typical of the spas of central Europe. When in 1924 the dictator Primo de Rivera banned the game, it was used for other activities. And for a while, it became a movie theater.

Although I don't know exactly when it was, I remember that my parents took us to the Great Kursaal. It was before 1973, when he was shot down. We went to see William Wyler's Peplum Ben-Hur in 1959, based on Lew Wallace's novel, without the age allowed to watch the film. The entrance to the room made us learn well the answer to the question of our age before leaving home. And on Monday, at ikastola, we were representing the car race between Masala and Ben-Eng at recess.

When I started making the list of missing rooms after my departure from San Sebastian, I realized that the loss was greater than I thought.

It is worth listing the missing rooms from neighborhood to neighborhood so that those who do not know the Gipuzkoan capital find out about their expansion in San Sebastián: Amara, Astoria and Rex Avenida; downtown: Amaya, Fine Arts, Novelty, Novelty and Actualities (which later became the Kutxa room and used the cineclub Kresala); Grosen, Savoy; In the Old Town, Petit Casino, Miramar and Main Theatre (named as Principal); Egia, Dunixi. And of course, the Victoria Eugenia Theater, at one end of the Boulevard.

That is, in addition to other non-commercial theaters where you could watch movies, each neighborhood had their own more or less.

Today, in the Old Town there is a movie theater. However, at the beginning of the last century, the ancients also had their own room: In the plans of the Villa Arcadia building, where the streets Heriz and Matia converge, in the place where today there was a bank and before the bar Etxeberria, there is a “coffee-cinema”, which was given the name of Charola Cinema.

Through this road movie we can see what has replaced the movie theater, and we would realize that film viewing has gone from being a public event to becoming a private and often individual event that takes place in the backyard. However, on increasingly larger screens with the ability to interrupt the show of going to the bathroom or to the kitchen on demand.

On the first day of the festival, I went to see a single second of Zhang Yimou. Almost five decades later, a one-second trip per hour from the Grand Kursaal to the current Kursaal hall on the Ben-Bad Carriage.