Excellent EQZE representation at the 67th edition of ZINEBI

The 67th ZINEBI Bilbao International Documentary and Short Film Festival (21-28 November) will feature a significant selection of films developed at the Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola, as well as works recovered from the festival's film archive within the framework of the ‘ZINEBI Deposit’ research project developed in collaboration with the festival.

Maria Inês Gonçalves will compete alongside the makers of another 58 short films in the Official Selection with La durmiente, nominated for Best European Short Film at the Rotterdam Film Festival earlier this year. The documentaries Utopías y otras especies by Júlia Izaguirre, and La cumbre and Galdetzen duten begiradak, both directed by Ander Reviejo, will feature in the Bertoko begiradak – Miradas desde Euskadi section. The film Gombaut (Maite Alonso and Unai Ruiz), which was partially digitised in the EQZE laboratories, will also participate in this same section.

In addition to films made by students at the school, Fuck the Polis by Portuguese filmmaker Rita Azevedo Gomes will also be screened in the Beautiful Docs section. The Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola is one of the film’s associate producers.

‘ZINEBI Deposit’ project sessions

ZINEBI has a collection of 340 films that have been deposited with the Basque Film Archive since 2018. Since 2022, a research group made up of EQZE students from various intake years and researcher Santiago Aguilar has been cataloguing all the copies. In addition to the identification and cataloguing work, several lines of research have been opened, which have materialized in a series of articles on the history of the festival (accessible on the EQZE website), and, following the main axes of the project, also through outreach programs for the collection.

ZINEBI has also scheduled two special sessions. The first is a screening that forms part of the ‘Los subterráneos’ project by the Archivistas Salvajes collective, featuring two short films by Cuban filmmaker Manuel Marzel, A Norman McLaren (1990)—awarded the Mikeldi d'Oro at the 34th edition of ZINEBI—and Evidentemente comieron chocolate suizo (1992). The second will feature the documentaries Las Madres: The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo (1985), co-directed by Lourdes Portillo and Susana Blaustein, and Comunicado desde Argentina (1977), by the US collective Lucha Film. The session has been organised by Matías Fajn and Paola Buontempo, both of whom are researchers, programmers and students at the EQZE. The copies that will be screened during the session were digitised in the school's laboratories.

Finally, Aia Kruse, Anaís Córdova, Antonio Miguel Arenas, Matías Fajn and Esmeralda Reynoth, all students from different intake years at the school, will participate in the ZINEBI Ataria programme. This series of talks, organised within the ZINEBI Networking section, offers an open space for dialogue and reflection on the diverse ways of experiencing, thinking about and making films today.