The Director of the San Sebastian Festival, José Luis Rebordinos, and the president of Loterías y Apuestas del Estado (SELAE), Jesús Huerta Almendro, signed an agreement today in Madrid, under which Loterías becomes a sponsoring partner of the Festival’s Archive project, Zinemaldia 70. All possible stories.
This agreement is part of the Loterías’ commitment to return a profit to society as a whole. This support takes the shape of its constant sponsoring policy focused on the social, cultural, research and sporting spheres. In this case, through this agreement, Loterías promotes the cultural value of San Sebastian Festival's Archive project.
The initiative is promoted by the Festival and the research department of the Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola (EQZE), Tabakalera - International Centre for Contemporary Culture and the Filmoteca Vasca, and its objective is to generate a living archive of the Festival, the first phase of which will culminate for its 70th edition, in 2022.

The project aims to highlight the importance of the Festival’s documentary collection (letters, photographs, reviews and mentions in newspapers and magazines, books...) by means of creating digitized collections freely accessible online. The project, which will involve teachers and students at the EQZE, aspires to generate reflection and discussion on the past, present and future of the Festival.

Especifically, the agreement with Loterías will remain in place throughout this year and will enable us to give an important boost to the actions envisaged for 2019, focussed on moving, preparing and processing the documents in the collection. In these current months, work is underway on an inventory and technical report on the state of conservation of the whole collection and two of its sections are now being taken to the conservation premises of the Filmoteca Vasca: the General Archive (correspondence, internal and external Festival documentation) and the Newspaper Library (press releases). The total volume of material transferred to date amounts to 1,037 boxes, 180 bound volumes and 121 folders.  

Thanks to the support of Loterías, work is also underway to digitize all issues of the Festival daily (1957-2019) for their publication in an open repository and treatments are being applied to guarantee correct preservation of the paper collection. With a view to lending visibility to the contents of the project, actions have been anticipated such as a public cycle of activities to be held in San Sebastian towards the end of the year with screenings, round tables and debates.

Meanwhile, eight students from the Curating and Preservation specialities at the EQZE are working on research to analyse the changes experienced by the Festival during the years of the transition to democracy, establishing a comparative analysis with the history of other festivals such as Cannes, Belin and Venice.

LINES OF WORK

The work group of Zinemaldia 70. All possible stories is made up of the coordinator of the research department at the EQZE, Pablo La Parra, and of its director, Carlos Muguiro, students in the Preservation and Curating specialities, representatives of Tabakalera’s Ubik creation library and the Filmotecta Vasca, and the Festival team, headed by Ana Esperanza Redondo. Ubik will also provide specialised advice on how to proceed with processing the documents in the Festival’s archive collection, which will have its physical location in the Filmoteca Vasca facilities.

The work will develop in two spaces: in the Martutene depot, where the materials are currently organised, and in Tabakalera, where the materials will be examined, added to an inventory and catalogued, in order to guarantee their presentation and the conditions of public access. Consultation of the collection will have a number of routes and users will be able to locate materials not only by year, but by subject: for example, the effects of the Transition on the Festival, political violence in Basque and Spanish films, the Ikuska short films and the attempt to achieve a Basque national cinema, the Kimuak generation...  

There will be two lines of work, simultaneous and connected to one another: on the one hand, the generation of research material—academic articles, presentations at conferences, own editorial projects, seminars, etc.—for researchers and, on the other, socialisation of the results and the creation of contents intended for broader publics. Every year the conclusion of the research work will be made public in the shape of exhibitions, publications or screening programmes. The idea is to organise cycles accompanied by explanatory materials in which critical dialogues are proposed between films programmed in previous editions of the Festival, their cinematographic, social or political context and contemporary films.