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).
The Austrian director Sebastian Meise has brought his first feature Stillleben to Zabaltegi. It’s about a family man who pays prostitutes to live out his fantasies about his daughter. Meise said that he hadn’t been inspired by extreme cases of child abuse like Josef Fritzl’s; in fact the original idea came out of a research project run at the Charité Hospital in Berlin, where they treat paedophiles who still haven’t lived out their fantasies.
Another debut feature screened in the Zabaltegi yesterday was the Israeli film A Beautiful Valley, which was the first time it had been shown outside of Israel. Its young director Hadar Friedlich explained that she had aimed to show the experiences of an 80- year-old woman whose world falls apart when the kibbutz that she herself helped to found is privatised, and use this as the background to tell a story about the changes that people have to come to terms with in life.