ANA MURUGARREN & MARÍA EUGENIA SALAVERRI. TWO HIGHLY VALUED FEMALE FILMMAKERS
In life, there are sometimes exceptional, unexpected occasions or situations that tend to make us look around in search of valid points of reference to help us overcome difficulties, not lose hope, and succeed and overcome. The coronavirus pandemic that we are experiencing is testing our personal character and, especially, capacity for resistance and the cohesion of our communities. In this observation of everything that we are and could be, we often realise that the best thing we have is much closer than we think. We have always done so, but even more so for this 62nd festival, ZINEBI has taken a look around at what we have nearby: at our Basque cinema. We know that our audiovisual industry is a constantly developing economic, cultural and artistic sector, whose current reality is the work of men and women who, in conditions that are not always easy, give us the best of themselves in so many memorable films that form part of our country’s cinematographic heritage.
During the 1980s and 1990s, at a time when the presence of women in Basque productions was usually reduced to secondary roles, both the director, scriptwriter and editor Ana Murugarren and the writer, scriptwriter and producer María Eugenia Salaverri soon became acknowledged as authentic pioneers. Their work and their tenacity make them worthy of this Mikeldi of Honour.
Ana Murugarren (Marcilla, Navarra, 1965), with a degree in Information Sciences from the UPV-EHU, is a film director, writer and editor, having worked in the latter capacity with filmmakers such as Enrique Urbizu, Pablo Berger and Álex de la Iglesia. In the 1980s, she founded the Bilbao production company Creativideo with the aforementioned Urbizu, Joaquín Trincado and Luis Marías, and her first work as a director was the video clip for the band Eskorbuto: Antes de las guerras (1985).
In 2005, she directed the documentary feature film Esto no es la vida privada de Javier Krahe, followed by the mini television series El precio de la libertad (2011), dedicated to the Basque politician Mario Onaindia, the medium-length film set in medieval times La dama guerrera (2012), and the feature films Tres mentiras (2014), a stark view of the theft of children in Franco’s Spain, and La higuera de los bastardos (2017), based on the book of the same name by Ramiro Pinilla on Falangist repression in Getxo during the Spanish civil war. She is currently filming the comedy García y García, starring José Mota and Pepe Viyuela. Her films have received numerous awards, including the Silver Screen Award at the Hollywood Film Festival for La higuera de los bastardos, and her main themes are the condemnation of different situations of injustice and the conservation of our historic memory.
For her part, María Eugenia Salaverri (Bilbao, 1957) is a journalist, writer, scriptwriter, and a songwriter too. In her literary facet, her stories have been awarded prizes such as the Samaniego, the Imagínate Euskadi and the Julio Cortázar and have been published in compilations and anthologies such as Narradores vascos, Últimos narradores (Antología de la narrativa breve española), Relato español actual and Rainy Days (Short Stories by Contemporary Spanish Women Writers). She has been the chairperson of the Basque Writers’ Association since 2012.
In 1996, with Javier Rebollo directing, she began her cinematographic activity as a scriptwriter for the feature films Calor… y celos (1996), Marujas asesinas (2001) and Locos por el sexo (2006). Subsequently, with the production company Karambola, founded with Rebollo, she has written and produced the TV films El extraño anfitrión (2012), La buena hija (2013), La matanza (2015) and De los ojos adentro (2019). She also participated in the collective film Bilbao-Bizkaia. Exterior-Día (El amigo imaginario segment) (2015), a ZINEBI production released by the festival that same year. Her work has always been inspired by a very dark, expressionist sense of humour—with arguments that often come from genres such as horror and fantasy—which she has used to tackle some of the blackest areas of human behaviour with brilliant frankness.
María Eugenia and Ana are one of the main points of reference for this ZINEBI62. And they are because, through their effort, their talent and their ethical and aesthetic qualities, they show us that, in the pandemical times we are living, Basque cinema still has lots of very good stories to tell us.
That—and because we love them loads—is why ZINEBI has decided to award them the Mikeldi of Honour for this so unforgettable 2020, as an expression of its acknowledgement, and that of the men and women of Bilbao, for their valuable contribution to the cinematography of Bilbao and of the Basque Country.
Luis Eguiraun
Screenwriter and programmer at ZINEBI (2003-2019)
