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 film Temblores (2019), directed by the Guatemalan filmmaker Jayro Bustamante, will receive the seventh Sebastiane Latino Award decided by a jury of members of GEHITU, the Basque Association of Gays, Lesbians, Transsexuals and Bisexuals. Presentation of the award, organised by the community to acknowledge the best Latin American LGBTI film of 2019, will take place at the 67th edition of the San Sebastian Festival, running from September 20-28.
Temblores, included in the Festival’s Horizontes Latinos selection, is a co-production between Guatemala, France and Luxembourg narrating the life of Pablo, a 40 year-old married man and father of two. Cristiano, a medical assistant, is a role model, but his perfect traditional life collapses when he falls in love with a man and his feelings clash with his beliefs. His existence becomes an inferno of repressive intolerance when his family and the church decide to do what it takes to cure him, forcing him to supress his impulses with therapy.
GEHITU has decided to give its award to this film for its denunciation of the “scourge” represented by the so-called gay conversion therapies, an “aberration” sold as a science which, in fact, represent a “psychological violation”. “Given that this is a phenomenon occurring in the private sphere and under the guise of religious liberty, the survivors neither denounce their families nor do states intervene as they should”, laments the association. At the purely cinematic level, the jury highlights the work of Bustamante and the cast of actors, who have used irony, “between drama and comedy” to address this thorny issue. GEHITU also mentions the work of the photography and wardrobe teams, which helps to accentuate the “lack of definition” pursued in this film.
Following his participation in Films in Progress at the San Sebastian Festival, Bustamante won the Alfred Bauer Award at the Berlin Festival with his debut film, Ixcanul (2015), which went on to compete in Horizontes Latinos. Temblores, his second feature film, premiered in the Berlinale’s Panorama section and will also screen this year in Horizontes Latinos. Furthermore, in 2018 the director won the EFADs-CACI Award at the Europe-Latin America Co-Production Forum with his project La Llorona, this year’s Horizontes Latinos closing film, screening out of competition.