The II ZINEBIskopio edition will continue with its original purpose: to bring a festival open to its experiences and discussions to the city and its residents, and for cinema to be a tool for memory, reflection and shared experience. Its title suggests an optical instrument to look at reality from different angles.
Each edition is dedicated to one of the communities that form part of Bilbao. If it was the Georgian community in 2025, it is the Colombian this year, with a session of short films as an invitation to discover its cinema and to share it with its citizens who have settled in our city.
The section also addresses films for a social purpose: works born out of collaborating with community groups, of intergenerational touchpoints or entities that find a way of being seen and heard in images. They are films whose value lies both in what they show and in how they make it possible.
The screenings are accompanied by presentations and, in some cases, Q&A sessions. Conversation is an integral part of ZINEBIskopio: pooling experiences and perspectives, letting other voices be heard and fostering encounters around filmmaking.
Sofía travels to Ibiza to work during the summer. Before returning home at the end of the season, she invites her girlfriend, Luciana. Between walks, chance encounters, and sunsets by the sea, Luciana discovers the island through Sofía’s eyes—and in her gaze, she confirms a truth she had sensed for months but had not dared to name.
Bocachico Band is rooted in a passion for music and the desire to share the richness and diversity of Colombian and Latin-American rhythms in a show with the emphasis on identity, talent and energy.
This group of eight musicians brings together different musical experiences, styles and tastes to create a versatile, fresh approach with its own unique identity. Its repertoire captures the sounds of the cumbia, vallenato, champeta and salsa, while not forgetting the great classics and covers appreciated by multi-generational audiences.
What is a personal diary?
Just Girls opens, for the first time, dozens of teenage diaries that had been sealed away forever. The film undertakes an exercise in literary rehabilitation: it rescues books that were historically neglected and reveals a common body. And so, a possible genealogy of intimate writing and its destruction emerges.
Just Girls is a cinematic cross-out. A feminist journey, from the cheesy to the political. And also, as a friend put it, ‘a film-zine made from all our diaries’.
I am grateful to the Chinese for the invention of gunpowder — it feels as if they made it for me. Its discovery happened by accident, originally conceived as a way to ward off evil spirits. This film begins in China, then moves to an event in Cartagena, and ends centuries later in Bogotá.
Teotiste has decided that she does not want to continue living alone in the countryside after her husband's disappearance. Still, a force she does not understand prevents her from leaving without first doing something in life.
Aurora, Dessi, and Samara, three Roma women, head to the centre of Bilbao to buy a birthday present for their niece Sarai.
Amid laughter and complicity, a group of Romani women improvise scenes at the Otxarkoaga Civic Center. Sisterhood and empowerment emerge from this drama workshop, giving life to a documentary that aims to be a love letter to Basque Romani women. A bridge, a joyful chant, and handclaps to the wind that remind us that stories, even when improvised and made up, are precisely what we need to bring us closer to one another.
Chemotherapy leaves Candela feeling insecure and undesirable. To brave love again, she must confront her shame and reclaim her femininity.
In 1970s Spain, Ali, a young Moroccan student, faces discrimination at university while trying to pass his math class. With the unexpected support of a classmate, he challenges the rigid norms of the dictatorship.
Emma no longer recognizes her neighborhood. And now, she has become invisible: in a neighborhood that, with each passing day, looks more and more like something else, where does she belong now? Putanesca is a short film that explores an invisibility that is no mere metaphor—an invisibility born of loneliness, grief, and a city that is transforming into something else.
Eleven-year-old Fer travels with his family to a countryside resort a few hours outside Bogotá. Although Fer’s father will be doing business, he has promised to make time for family fun, something that has been missing from their lives for a while.
In the mountains of Colombia, Juan, a 13-year-old mestizo boy, son of an Indigenous woman and a journalist, is forced to flee from the monster of war. Along his journey, the earth itself protects him and, guided by the voices of his ancestors, he awakens an ancient power called Tucuna, which allows him to transform and be reborn. Transformed into Tuktu, a Taita of extraordinary strength, he understands that his destiny is not only to survive, but to return and heal the wounds of war, sowing peace in the land that gave him life.
