The Sitges Festival opens its 59th edition on 8 October: Peter Jackson, Danny DeVito and Kevin Bacon top the guest list, tickets up 19%

The 59th edition of SITGES – the International Fantastic Film Festival of Catalonia, the benchmark competition for fantastic cinema, opens on Thursday, 8 October. As the Sitges Festival’s official website announces, the institutional press conference was held on 1 October at the Filmoteca de Catalunya in Barcelona, a week before the opening, with the participation of the general director of the Foundation Mònica Garcia Massagué, the director of the Catalan Institute for Cultural Companies (ICEC) Edgar Garcia Casellas and the mayor of Sitges Aurora Carbonell. According to Massagué, in the first days of sales tickets have risen by 19% compared with the same period last year.

Among the confirmed guests of this edition are Sir Peter Jackson, Danny DeVito, Meiko Kaji, Amy Irving and Kevin Bacon, as well as Casey Affleck and Heather Graham. Kevin Bacon and his wife Kyra Sedgwick, both honoured with this year’s Honorary Award, will present their new co-directed film, the meta-narrative dark comedy «Family Movie», together with their son Travis Bacon.

The meetings programme includes the South Korean director Na Hong-jin («Hope»), the special-effects master Rick Baker, the actor Michael Ironside, the director Nicolas Winding Refn together with the composer Pino Donaggio («Carrie»), as well as Mark L. Lester, winner of the Time Machine Award, who opened the festival in 1984 with «Firestarter».

The festival repeats the MaestrAs programme, the second edition dedicated to women pioneers of horror and the fantastic: Adrienne Barbeau («Escape from New York», «The Fog»), Bárbara Rey — the “scream queen” of 1970s Spanish «Fantaterror» — the producer Julie Corman, the concept artist Virginie Bourdin and Anna Biller («The Love Witch»). The WomanInFan programme also continues, and on 9 October the winner of the 2nd Josefina Molina Award for the best screenplay written by a woman (€10,000 prize) will be announced, in honour of the pioneering director Josefina Molina, who died in May 2026.

A special moment will be the 30th anniversary of Alejandro Amenábar’s debut, «Tesis» — the film that changed Spanish genre cinema — with the director’s reunion with two actors from the original cast, Eduardo Noriega and Fele Martínez. Under the motto «We Are Legend», the festival also strengthens its commitments to sustainability and accessibility.