Awards

The Mikeldi trophy is the Basque artist Maite Leyún’s re-reading of one of Bikzia’s best known images: the Mikeldi idol, a sandstone block representing a wild boar, and which has defined the Bilbao International Documentary and Short Film Festival right from the start in 1959. At that time, its founders explained the reasons for the choice of the trophy: to be at the forefront of international documentary film awards. They justified its name and image “as an iconic symbol of Bizkaia […] is the sandstone figure representing a wild boar, found in Durago (Bizkaia). It is a Celtic votive offering similar to the bulls and hogs found in mainland Spain and Portugal, but with a moon or sun disk peculiar to Bizkaia”. Starting from that figure in the Basque Museum in Bilbao, and miniature reproductions of which were presented as trophies from the start of the festival, Maite Leyún embarked on “creating a new shape that is unlike anything known but which recalls the Mikeldi”. Thus, ZINEBI’s current trophy is “a ceramic object that, based on an ancient carving, seeks to be a new form to recognise the work of those people that are as concerned about how things are done as about recounting something”.