Joachim Lafosse’s San Sebastian-bound feature Six Days in Spring is admittedly a deeply personal project.

French actress Eye Haïdara (The Nannies, C’est la vie!) leads the Belgian director’s new film. She stars as Sana, a mother struggling to provide her 10-year-old twins (Teodor and Leonis Pinero Müller in their film debuts) with a spring vacation. When their plans collapse, she secretly takes them to a luxury villa on the French Riviera owned by her former in-laws. Over six days, joy and anxiety collide as the family hides in plain sight in what can be described as a biographical piece of filmmaking for Lafosse.

“After my parents divorced, my mother had money problems,” he confesses to The Hollywood Reporter ahead of the world premiere of Six Days in Spring in competition at the Spanish film fest on Sept. 20. He’s no stranger to the festival circuit with 2012’s Our Children making a splash in Cannes and 2006’s Private Property with Isabelle Huppert debuting in Venice. It’s his sixth film to screen at San Sebastian, and perhaps his most intimate one yet.

“She had to be working a lot, to make ends meet, but she wanted us to have a vacation,” he continues about his mother’s influence on the new movie, a France-Luxembourg-Belgium co-production. With his mother and brother, Lafosse went to his grandparents’ house, but the three of them were forced to use candles for light and avoid running hot water, lest his father found out.

“My grandparents, they were wealthy, they had money, and suddenly my mother… she was not related to them, and [so] she didn’t have money,” Lafosse says. “A few months earlier, we were at the beautiful house and we had the right to be there. In that moment, my brother and I understood the logic of social class.” The crux of this film, he adds, is an analysis of “at what moment you stop belonging to a family.”

It almost became a cathartic outlet for the director, who was hoping for a chance to illustrate the emotional violence of divorce on screen. “If you are separated as a couple, you are still parents [and] you still have to raise those kids together and for those children to go on holidays.”

Haïdara’s tender, considered performance anchors Lafosse’s film. He considers why she was so right for the role of Sana. “I’m not a sociologist. I’m a filmmaker,” he responds. “And for me, a filmmaker is somebody who writes the characters. I know [Sana’s] story — she was living with her husband before they separated, and I was looking for an actress who was moving, who could [show us] some kind of resistance.”

On taking his personal story and setting it within a Black family, Lafosse admits there’s something political there — and the issue is not confined to his native Belgium or France. “We have to consider each story on an individual basis… but cinema is always political.” He continues: “The success, for me, is not to show what’s happened with the Black people in this area. But my [hope] is that audience and critics, they see exactly what’s happened. They recognize the situation — that more and more people are having to hide. It’s not only [happening in] the U.S.”

Lafosse hopes his new film will prompt audiences to draw their own conclusions here on Spain’s northern coast. He lauds San Sebastian’s directorial team, including fest boss José Luis Rebordinos, who spoke to THR about the fest’s eclectic lineup earlier in the week. “They feel passion, real passion for cinema,” continues Lafosse. “Here, you have the possibility to see the best movie of the year.”

Six Days in Spring premieres in competition at the 2025 San Sebastian International Film Festival, running Sept. 19-27. Watch the trailer here.