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Z365" or "Festival all year round" is the new strategic point of the Festival in which converge investigation, accompaniment and development of new talents (Ikusmira Berriak, Nest); training and cinematic knowledge transfer (Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola, Zinemaldia + Plus, Filmmakers' dialogue); and investigation, disclosure and cinematic thought (Z70 project, Thought and Discussion and Research and publications).
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José Saramago was born in Azinhaga, Portugal, in November 1922, although he spent most of his adult life in Lisbon, to which his parents moved for economic reasons. Professionally, he was a locksmith, mechanic, clerk, translator, literary critic and publisher. He wrote a novel at the age of 23, but decided that he had nothing to say and proceeded to publish nothing for the next 20 years. Later, middle-aged, he wrote poetry, a travelog (Journey to Portugal), plays and, finally, novels when he was about to turn 60, the age at which others are normally considering retirement. Ever since publishing Picked Up from the Ground, he has continued to write regularly, tackling, with his peculiar and transgressive style, widely ranging subjects, always starting with an impossible situation that finally lodges itself in the reader’s imagination.
Saramago separated the Iberian peninsula from Europe, set a dead Fernando Pessoa dialoguing with his living Ricardo Reis heteronym, had Jesus Christ reflecting on power and guilt and planning to flee the designs of a boring God, blinded all of the inhabitants of a city or made all of the inhabitants of a city, perhaps the same one, cast blank votes in an unprecedented display of citizenry. He is currently writing the memoires of his childhood and teenage years.
His works have been translated into over 40 languages and published in practically every country in the world. He has also written, in collaboration with the Italian musician Azio Corghi, three operas performed in Germany, Milan
and Portugal. Some of his novels have been or are being taken to the big screen, although Saramago considers that literary and cinematographic discourse don’t gel, that they follow parallel paths.
He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998.
A staunch left-winger, he is always prepared to speak up for those who need a different world in order to be able to live with dignity. Of himself, he has said: “The older I get, the freer I get, and the freer I get, the more radical I get”.
Monday to friday: 09:00h a 14:00h | 16:00h a 19:00h