In the film collection of the International Festival of Documentary and Short Film of Bilbao (ZINEBI), comprising 340 films and deposited in the Basque Film Library, there was one film cans among so many others. That can contained an animated film that was a gem of part of the history of Latin-American cinema. From the outside, a history of dictatorships, violence and exile. The film was La persecución de Pancho Villa (1978) and the history of the Grupo Cine Sur, a filmmaking group who struggle and modus operandi are featured in this session.
Grupo Cine Sur’s goal was to produce political animated films. From the animation desks in Cuernavaca, Morelos, the group of young people exiled after the 1976 coup d’etat in Argentina sang La persecución de Pancho Villa – a prize winner at the first La Habana Film Festival. Later on, they worked with the Cine de la Base group to focus on the utopia of the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua through the El compa Clodomiro series (1981).
After La persecución de Pancho Villa was shown in Bilbao in 1978, they returned to the festival in 1982 with El compa Clodomiro series. Forty-five years later, the Grupo Cine Sur is again returning to ZINEBI with three short films that invite us to reflect on the ways to build memory and to think about – and make – contemporary cinema.
This session is part of the outcome of the ‘ZINEBI Deposit’ research project, organised by Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola. During 2025-2026, the project team researched the work of the group and interviewed its members from Argentina, Mexico, France and the Dominican Republic. The research group’s progress will be showcased at this session, along with the La persecución de Pancho Villa (1978, 8’), El compa Clodomiro y el capitalismo (1981, 4’) and El compa Clodomiro y la explotación (1981, 4’) films.
ZINEBI Deposit
Andrea Velasco, Andrés Monraz, Ane García, Carmina Frankel, Carolina Monti
Based on a letter from activist Lili Massaferro to an American friend, narrated in voice-over, and using archival material from various Argentine media outlets, the film recounts Lili’s personal story and her political commitment, intertwined with Argentina’s own history: Peronism and the figure of Evita, the death of her son Manolo, and the Peronist feminist movement of the 1970s.
Using a combination of animation, documentary and animated photo techniques, Clodomiro explains the development of capitalism in today’s society. A digitised version of a 16 mm projection print belonging to the Film Library at the National Autonomous University of Mexico is screened.
Buddy Clodomiro relates the story of the class divide within the communities and how oppressor and oppressed nations emerged in history. A digitised version of a magnetic media copy belonging to Martín Salinas’s personal archive is screened.
This animation film relates General Pershing’s punitive expedition as an epic narrative, when he fought the US Army when it entered Mexico and pursued Villa’s revolutionary troops. The film is based on the Mexican folk ballad of the same name, whose verses recount the clash with the humour and the imagination typical of this popular genre. A digitised version produced at the Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola from a 16 mm projection print belonging to the ZINEBI collection is screened.
