THE BIG DAY OF BASQUE CINEMA
In its 60th year-and you can do a lot in sixty years-ZINEBI would like to renew its commitment to cinema produced in the Basque Country and to the development and projection abroad of our audio-visual industry. This has been our aim since 1959, the year that saw the foundation of the International Ibero-American and Philippine Documentary Film Contest of Bilbao (the festival’s original name even though it sounds like something out of a time warp today). In fact, from that time right up to this year, the festival programme has included the very first works by Basque filmmakers from at least four different generations: Pío Caro Baroja, Néstor Basterretxea, Fernando Larruquert, José Antonio Sistiaga, Pedro Olea, José Ángel Rebolledo, José Julián Bakedano, Imanol Uribe, Anton Merikaetxebarria, Juan Ortuoste, Javier Rebollo, Ramón Barea, Ernesto del Río, Julio Medem, Juanma Bajo Ulloa, Asier Altuna, Jon Garaño, Borja Cobeaga, Be-goña Vicario, Haritz Zubillaga, Koldo Almandoz, Isabel Herguera, Víctor Iriarte, Laida Lertxundi and Izibene Oñederra, amongst many others. Sixty years are quite a few years – enough to allow us to contemplate most of the passage (and the weight) of the history of moving images in our country.
In 2008, coinciding with the 50th International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Bilbao (ZINEBI, as it was newly branded in 2000), the festival gave a warm tribute to some of the first of these filmmakers-Caro Baroja, Basterretxea, the then recently deceased Larruquert, Olea, Uribe and Bakedano-in acknowledgement of their courage in their profession and even their civic value during the harsh conditions of the post-war period and Franco’s dictatorship.
Before the 1970s, film directed and produced in Bilbao has historically been reduced to a series of barely connected attempts and experiences. During the three decades before the Spanish Civil War, it is worth mentioning the pioneer films produced by the brothers Mauro and Víctor Azcona and especially their feature film entitled El mayorazgo de Basterretxe (1928). From after the war, in the mid-1960s, the medium-length documentary Ría de Bilbao, directed by Pedro Olea in 1966, is worthy of note.
As mentioned above, it is in the 1970s when we begin to see producers, directors and other professionals in Bilbao whose work will manage to provide continuity to cinematographic production in our city. They include the people we are paying tribute to at this 60th event:
-José Ángel Rebolledo (Bilbao, 1941) studied Industrial Engineering but dropped out to take a degree in Film Production at the Spanish Official Film School (EOC) in 1973. In 1975, he directed the experimental short film Arriluce. He has also worked as a film editor, production assistant and screenwriter. In 1983, along with Imanol Uribe, Javier Aguirresarobe and Gon-zalo Berridi, he founded the production company Aiete Films and, in 1985, he made his first feature film, Fuego eterno.
-Anton Merikaetxebarria (Bilbao, 1944) is a director, screenwriter, critic and film essayist. He holds a diploma in Cinematography from the London Film School (1969-1971). During the 1970s, he directed several shorts, such as Rumores de furia (1973), Arrantzale (1975), Santuario profundo (1976) and Ikuska 3 (1979). He has been a critic in the Basque media, such as Egin, Muga and Euskadi and, since 1985, in the daily newspaper El Correo. In 2003, he published his essay El enigma Ingmar Bergman.
-Alberto López Echevarrieta (Bilbao, 1945) is a journalist, polygraph, critic and cinematographic essayist. With a degree in Journalism from the Official School in Madrid, he worked as a news reporter for Radio Popular in Bilbao and was the editor of the newspaper Pueblo for ten years. He has also been a member of the ZINEBI organising committee. His works feature El cine en Vizcaya (1977), Cine vasco, ¿realidad o ficción? (1982) and Bilbao, cine y cinematógrafos (2000).
– Santos Zunzunegui (Bilbao, 1947) is a critic, image theorist, film writer and emeritus professor of the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). His work, for which he has obtained extensive national and international acknowledgement, started at the magazine Contracampo (1979) and has continued since 2007 at Caimán. Cuadernos de cine. His works include Mirar la imagen (1984), El cine en el País Vasco (1985) and his monographs Robert Bresson (2001) and Orson Welles (2005). He has recently won the Euskadi Essay Award for his work Bajo el signo de la melancolía.
-Juan Ortuoste (Bilbao, 1948) co-founded the Bilbao production company Lan Zinema (1973) with Javier Rebollo. After a few years of intense activity in the field of advertising, the company produced the short films Carmen, 3º G (1978) and Agur, Txomin (1981), amongst others. That same year, he debuted as a director with the comedy Siete calles (co-directed with Rebollo). In 1985, he produced Golfo de Vizcaya and, in 1989, he directed El mar es azul. He has alternated his work as a producer and director with that of screenwriter and film editor.
-Ramón Barea (Bilbao, 1949) is a theatre, film and television actor, playwright, scenographer and film producer. As a film actor, he has worked on more than one hundred films and with directors such as Iciar Bollaín, Álex de la Iglesia and Borja Cobeaga. As a director, he debuted with the short film Adiós, Toby, adiós (1996), followed by Muerto de amor (1997). He also directed the feature films Pecata minuta (1999) and El coche de pedales (2004).
-Javier Rebollo (Bilbao, 1950) has worked mostly as a screenwriter, producer and director with Juan Ortuoste at the production company Lan Zinema. He directed the feature films Golfo de Vizcaya (1985), Calor…y celos (1996), Marujas asesinas (2001) and Locos por el sexo (2006) and, with the production company Karambola Producciones and the collaboration of the writer and screenwriter Mª Eugenia Salaverri, he has directed La buena hija (2013) and Txarriboda (2015), amongst others.
-Ernesto del Río (Bilbao, 1954) debuted in film direction with the short films Octubre 12 (1982) and El ojo de la tormenta (1983), both co-directed with Luis Eguiraun. In 1985, he co-founded-with the latter and other partners-the production company Sendeja Films. In 1987, he directed his first feature film, El amor de ahora, followed by No me compliques la vida (1990), Hotel y domicilio (1996), Valeria descalza (2011) and Umezurtzak (2015). He was the director of ZINEBI from 2000 to 2017.
As mentioned above, the culmination of the Day of Basque Cinema at ZINEBI 60 will be a well-deserved tribute to the figure and the prolific and highly personal work of José Antonio Sistiaga (San Sebastián, 1932), one of the most relevant artists of the historic avant-garde of the post-war years in the Basque Country, along with personalities such as Jorge Oteiza, Eduardo Chilli-da, Néstor Basterretxea and Rafael Ruiz Balerdi. As an experimental filmmaker, at the Bilbao festival in 1968, he presented his groundbreaking Ere erera baleibu icik subua aruaren…, which received the Experimental Cinema Award at that 10th festival. It was a 7-minute-long short made up of frames that had been hand-painted one by one and which the artist subsequently retitled De la luna a Euskadi. Fascinating material, which has now disappeared, which was the source of the feature film with the same original title, thought up by his friend Balerdi, that premiered in Madrid in 1970 and was later well received at festivals and exhibitions in Barcelona, London, Paris and New York. From 1988 to 1989, the artist used the same technique for his Impresiones en la alta atmósfera, designed to be screened in horizontal 70mm format in cinemas with giant IMAX screens, the same exhibition medium he used during the same period for his Han (sobre el sol). In 1991, he directed Paisaje inquietante nocturno and En un jardín imaginado, where he used a different technique and 35mm format for display. The Sistiaga tribute session will also include the exclusive premiere of the feature-length documentary Sistiaga, une histoire basque (Manuel Sorto, 2018. 96 min.), dedicated to this great Guipuzkoan artist’s way of being, existing in this world and creating. There will first be a screening of a special ZINEBI production entitled En la luna (2018) and directed by the animation group from the UPV/EHU Hauazkena and coordinated by Begoña Vicario, which reinterprets what remains in the memory of the artist of that lost short film, De la luna a Euskadi (1968).
This session and the screening of the short documentary film are in a video season called The Art of Time, curated by Guadalupe Echevarría, as part of the events organised by the Museum of Fine Arts of Bilbao on the occasion of the exhibition Después del 68. Arte y prácticas artísticas en el País Vasco 1968-2018. In this way, ZINEBI aims to collaborate more closely with the museum and enrich this 60th anniversary event on recent audio-visual production in the Basque Country.
ZINEBI 60 is awarding a Special Mikeldi and expressing the fondness of the festival organizers and the people of Bilbao for these nueve novísimos of film produced in the Basque Country, nine virtuous citizens who-through their patience and perseverance have created films that now form part of our cultural heritage, which is what the young Basque directors competing in the official section of this comprehensive anniversary of the Bilbao festival are now on their own way to doing.
Because not losing sight of the past and providing a testimony to the present is a good-surely the only-way to envisage the future.
Luis Eguiraun
Screenwriter and programmer at ZINEBI (2003-2019)
