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).
Bahman Ghobadi was born in 1968 in Baneh (Iranian Kurdistan). He joined a group of independent filmmakers as a student, making numerous short films, among which Life in the Fog (1999) earned especially high acclaim, winning the Special Jury Award at Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival.
Having worked as an assistant director on Abbas Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us (1999), Ghobadi directed his first feature film, A Time for Drunken Horses (2000), which won the Caméra d’Or at Cannes Festival and brought him international recognition. Marooned in Iraq (2002), his next film, was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes.
Bahman Ghobadi is two-time recipient of the Golden Shell, San Sebastian Festival’s highest award. The first went to his third film, Turtles Can Fly (2004), and the second to his fourth work, Half Moon (2006), this time ex-aequo with Mon fils à moi, by the French director Martial Fougeron.