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 Bulgarian directors/ scriptwriters Kristna Grozeva and Petar Valchanov, who are also husband and wife in real life, are in San Sebastián presenting Urok/The Lesson in the New Directors section. Although initially Valchanov devoted himself to the technical aspects of filmmaking while his wife wrote the scripts, they now work on the entire process together. This is their first feature film after a series of shorts and they confess that the most difficult thing about making the leap to full-length films has been to try and ensure that they maintain the audience’s attention for longer. They reveal that they got the idea for a story of a teacher who turns to crime order to pay off a debt to loan sharks from a headline they saw in the press but which they then developed independently.