Elías Querejeta Zine-Eskola will open its doors this October

Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola will start to take its first steps at the end of October and will do so by enhancing its film training, research and dissemination project.

The training course will start in September 2018, coinciding with the Film Festival, and will be implemented in three postgraduate courses devoted to studying the archiving, curating and creation of films. For its part, the research side will start in October 2017 and will be the first to start the activities of the school. This was the news released today by the Regional Minister for Culture, Denis Itxaso, and the Director of the centre, Carlos Muguiro. More specifically, a line of research on the recently discovered lessons on cinema by Andréi Tarkovski will be undertaken in collaboration with the institute that bears his name. In addition, two pre- and post-doctoral research grants will be available for researchers from Gipuzkoa. The dissemination-related course will begin with a public programme aimed at celebrating, raising awareness about and appreciating home movies. These events will take place between October 21 and 27, coinciding with two international events: International Home Movie Day and World Day for Audiovisual Heritage.

Academic year 2018-2019

Elías Querejeta Zine-Eskola, however, will launch its first class next year, on September 21, 2018, the same day as the start of the 66th edition of the San Sebastian Film Festival, making it a film school that will not start its course in the classroom but in the cinema. Itxaso explained that “given the dates we were dealing with, we ran the risk of being later than the usual period when students usually enrol and register at centres like these. We preferred to postpone the start of the postgraduate courses for a year, but making sure that we have enough time to properly address all potential students. In fact, we devised this first year as a thorough, comprehensive presentation of the centre’s future content.

Once started, it will be a journey of 54 weeks of classroom teaching activities which, completing the circle, will end around the next edition of the Festival, making it a termination point for students in the first year (who will still have time to finish off their personal projects), while being a launch point forf the school’s new students”.

The school, which was created by the Provincial Council of Gipuzkoa, has a unique educational project, consisting of three specialities (Archiving, Curating and Creating) that take shape from the knowledge fields of the three institutions involved in their conceptualisation: the Basque Film Archive, the San Sebastian Film Festival and Tabakalera - International Contemporary Culture Centre. The purpose of this approach and its three pathways is that students acquire the broadest and most cross-cutting view, which allows them to discuss the three ages of cinema: the past (research and preservation), present (curating and programming) and future (creation).

The people responsible for each speciality, respectively, will be Clara Sánchez-Dehesa, a specialist in conservation and restoration of film and audiovisual material, with a degree from the Jeffrey L. Selznick School of Film Preservation and in audiovisual heritage through a Master’s degree from the UCM, María Palacios Cruz, curator, writer and lecturer on cinema and moving image, former director of Courtisane Festival in Belgium and currently deputy director of LUX (based in London), an organisation dedicated to promoting artistic practices around moving image and Laida Lertxundi, a lecturer in Fine Arts and Humanities at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena (California), with a Master’s degree in Fine Arts from the California Institute of the Arts and author of works that have been projected at museums, festivals and galleries around the world.

The reporting period is now open and pre-registration will start in September. The tuition fee is 3,500 euros.

Research

After the extraordinary find in the archive by one of his closest aides of 90 hours of recordings of lessons on cinema taught by Andréi Tarkovski at film school in Moscow, Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola will collaborate with the Tarkovsky Institute in a project to research, restore and disseminate these recordings. The items that have been discovered are sound recordings from 1975 to 1981, in which the filmmaker addresses a wide range of points on the filmmaking profession, such as aesthetic, ethical, philosophical and psychological issues interspersed with reflections related to cinematographic theory and practice, among other subjects.

EQZE will be the only state institution involved in this project and landmark event and it will do so by disseminating this material in a number of workshops. The collaboration agreement will also allow one of the EQZE students to work on the restoration of these recordings in Moscow as part of their training at the school.

Furthermore, in its efforts to promote research and thinking about cinema, Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola will make two research grants available to Gipuzkoans, one pre- and one post-doctoral, to finance work, stays and other activities related to their projects. The amount of each of the two grants will be 3,000 euros and the scope will be studies related to the aesthetics of, history of and thinking on film. These grants will be compatible with any other grant or scholarship that the beneficiary has received.

The two proposals selected following a process, for which all of the details will be given soon, will be required to submit a summary of the progress of the research within six months and the complete result with findings after one year. They will also be required to publicly share their research at an event or events convened for that purpose or in the context of other activities organised by EQZE.

Dissemination

Coinciding with International Home Movie Day (October 21) and World Day for Audiovisual Heritage (October 27), the school will become an area to receive and gather together amateur material on any medium, which will be examined, checked and, where appropriate, digitised for better conservation and enjoyment by its owners. Part of this material will also be selected for screening in the cinema accompanied by live music. These seminars will be complemented by lectures and other activities related to the artistic reuse of amateur and home movies.

International Home Movie Day is an international event that has been held since 2002 and is aimed at raising awareness about the importance and fragility of audiovisual heritage. Families in different parts of the world are invited to rescue their own home archive, submit it for technical diagnosis by a curator and to share that material with the community in a festive and celebratory atmosphere.