The Bilbao International Festival of Documentary and Short Film – ZINEBI holds 340 documentary, animation, fiction and experimental films, which have been deposited in the Basque Film Archive / Euskadiko Filmategia since 2018. Thanks most especially to recognition in 1974 by the International Federation of Film Producers Associations (FIAPF) as a festival of the highest category, the event began to receive film copies for both screening and preservation. This marks the origin of the 176 35mm prints and 163 16mm prints produced between 1959 – the year the festival was created – and 2011, when the film industry finally left photochemical formats behind.
Thanks to an agreement struck by ZINEBI and Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola Film School (EQZE), since 2022 a research group led by Santiago Aguilar and composed of students from different graduating classes of the institution has catalogued all the film copies deposited in the archive’s facilities in San Sebastián. In addition, various lines of research based on these materials have given rise to articles on the festival’s history, such as an article by Aguilar published in Secuencias in 2024 with the title Zinebi, año uno. Further studies have delved into areas such as the preservation of materials produced on Orwo, an East German colour process, in the ZINEBI Collection (in an article by Aguilar, Marta López Lázaro and Izaro Cuesta); the collection of films by German directors Walter Heynowski and Gerhard Scheumann; and the Latin American slant which has characterised the festival almost from its beginnings.
In the Latin American focus we find films of remarkable historical and artistic interest, such as the experimental short by the recently deceased Cuban audiovisual artist Manuel Marzel, A Norman McLaren, which won an award in Bilbao over thirty years ago; the Oscar-nominated documentary Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, co-directed by Lourdes Portillo and Susana Blaustein; and the production Comunicado desde Argentina, made by the American collective Lucha Film on the life of Argentinian activist Lili Massaferro, which had never been screened in Argentina until this year, when a digitised copy from the ZINEBI Collection was presented in Buenos Aires. These three films are being shown at this year’s festival in special sessions curated and presented by the Archivistas Salvajes collective (for the screening dedicated to Marzel, which also includes another of his short films) and by programmers and researchers Matías Fajn and Paola Buontempo.
Rubén Corral Giménez
Inspired by Norman McLaren's direct animation techniques on celluloid, the short film constructs an abstract narrative using fragments of films found in the trash.
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.
A farce built on the supposed discovery of the last reel of a film long lost.
Documentary that captures the testimony of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, whose children were detained and disappeared during Argentina’s last military dictatorship (1976–1983).
