Claire Atherton, Marie Losier and Hlynur Pálmason to share their creative processes with the 2024-2025 intake year of students

This year, Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola will open its doors to its seventh intake of students. The 2024-2024 Academic Year starts today and will conclude in fifteen months' time, in December 2025, with the presentation of students’ graduation assignments.

The students accepted onto the course were selected by the school’s Academic Management Team (which includes representatives from the Basque Film Archive, the Tabakalera Centre for Contemporary Culture, the San Sebastián Film Festival and EQZE) from among the 207 applications received from 35 different countries during the admissions period (1-29 February). The 45 students who make up the seventh intake year at the school include 2 from the Autonomous Community of the Basque Country, 7 from other regions of Spain, 5 from European countries, 28 from Latin America, 2 from North America and 1 from Northern Africa. The mean age of this year’s students is 30 years.

In terms of academic profile, they include specialists in film preservation and archives; curators with experience managing and programming film festivals, film libraries, film seasons and artistic exhibitions and installations; filmmakers who have directed short films, feature films and installations; university lecturers and researchers; film school graduates; Visual Anthropology, Visual Art, Audiovisual Communication, Fine Art, Literary Studies, Philosophy, Humanities, Art History and Journalism graduates; teachers from the field of film production and distribution and specialists in areas such as editing, photography, sound and design.

During this first week, which will also see the start of the 72nd San Sebastián Film Festival, initial meetings will be held between students on the three postgraduate courses run by the school (Film Preservation, Film Curating and Filmmaking Studies). Other items on the agenda include the presentation of the syllabus, an introduction to the school and the institutions and projects that make it up and activities designed to help students get to know the different areas and spaces in Tabakalera. Classes will commence on 30 September.

2024-2025 academic year

One of the novelties of this year’s syllabus at Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola is the subject called ‘Methodologies of creation’, which will be taught jointly by Claire Atherton, Marie Losier and Hlynur Pálmason. The subject emerged from an invitation extended to these three filmmakers, who all have very different origins, trajectories and outlooks, to systematise and share with students the tools of their respective creative processes.

Claire Atherton (United States, 1963) is a film editor born in San Francisco. While studying at the École Nationale Supérieure Louis-Lumière in Paris she became interested in sound, and although she worked initially as a photography director, she later found her calling as a film editor. At the beginning of the 1980s she embarked on what would become a 30-year-long collaboration with Chantal Akerman, whom she met while working at the Simone de Beauvoir Centre. She currently works with artists and filmmakers such as Eric Baudelaire and Wang Bing.

Marie Losier (France, 1972) is a filmmaker and curator who has spent the last 23 years living and working in New York. Her films have been screened in museums, galleries, biennials and festivals such as Cannes, the Berlinale, the Rotterdam Festival, Locarno, the IDFA, the Tate Modern, the Georges Pompidou Centre and the MoMA, among others.

Hlynur Pálmason (Iceland, 1984) began working as a visual artist before deciding to train as a filmmaker at the National Film School of Denmark. In 2017 he directed his first feature film, Winter Brothers (Vinterbrødre, 2017), which won four prizes at Locarno. His next work, A White, White Day (Hvítur, hvítur dagur, 2019), was selected to screen in the Critics' Week section at Cannes. His latest feature film, Godland (Vanskabte Land, 2022), premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at that same festival.

All three filmmakers will share their working materials with students and will reflect openly about how they went about shaping their films.

The Argentinian archivist, collector, researcher and programmer Fernando Martín Peña (Buenos Aires, 1968) will engage in a research sojourn at the school during March and April 2025. Martín Peña will share his experience as a film archivist with students. His classes will focus on aspects such as the economic and financial sustainability of preservation projects, and the dissemination and socialisation of heritage research.

The teaching team working in the three specialist areas will include other professionals also from some of the most prestigious institutions in the world, as well as renowned filmmakers. During the 2024-2025 Academic Year, the following people will be visiting EQZE: Santiago Aguilar, Cristina Álvarez, Manuel Asín, Peter Bubestinger, Franco Bosco, Javier Codesal, Pedro Costa, Gonzalo de Pedro, Alfonso del Amo, Sonia García López, Gema Grueso, Iván Granovsky, Reto Kromer, Mariano Llinás, Adrian Martin, Ricardo Matos-Cabo, Beli Martínez, Matías Piñeiro, Camilo Restrepo, Lucía Salas, José Luis Sanz, Catarina Vasconcelos, Esther Urlus and Mona Jiménez, among others.

The list of local lecturers features Peio Aguirre, Xabier Erkizia, Michel Gaztambide, Mikel Gurrea, Irati Gorostidi, Niko Iturralde, Itziar Okariz, Ane Rodríguez Armendariz and Xanti Salvador. They will be joined by the team of tutors and professionals from the institutions participating in the project, who also form part of the faculty at the school.

The academic year is organised around six modules of varying duration. The first five modules (September-July) are teaching modules and are conducted face-to-face. The sixth module (August-December) is dedicated to students’ end-of-course assignments or hipótesis (‘hypotheses’) and is semi face-to-face in nature. Courses last for a total of fifteen months, structured in a circular fashion in order to reflect the philosophy of learning and experience that underpins the entire EQZE initiative.

Scholarships

Fourteen students will receive scholarships awarded by the Ibermedia Latin American Scholarship Fund, which has once again selected Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola within its Framework for Supporting Training Programmes (2023 call). The fund has provided the school with $50,000 to be awarded to students in the form of $3,571 scholarships designed to cover tuition fees. The assessment commission responsible for the programme highlighted, among other aspects, the fact that the school accompanies students during their projects ‘from development right up to commercialisation’, as well as the ‘importance of the studies provided in the field of film preservation and curating’ and ‘the alliance with the San Sebastián International Film Festival, the University, other festivals and the Tabakalera Centre’, within the framework of a project that it described as ‘solid and ambitious’. The commission also awarded the school close to the maximum score possible for infrastructures, equipment, teaching team and syllabus.

Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola is one of only two schools in Spain (the other being the Madrid Autonomous Community Audiovisual and Film School - ECAM) that have obtained the support of the fund in this category, which includes 23 other training projects from 12 different countries, selected from a total of 45 initial proposals. The aim of this specific programme is to foster the ongoing training of professionals working in the Latin American and Italian audiovisual industry.