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 Colombian filmmaker, Ciro Guerra, has visited the Festival on numerous occasions and this year he is here to present this first English-language film, Waiting for the barbarians, in Perlak. He explains that producer Michael Fitzgerald had been thinking about adapting J.M Coetzee’s novel for more than a decade encouraged by the author himself, but they hadn’t found the right director until they saw Guerra’s film El abrazo de la serpiente. He read the novel and saw that the story matched his interests fairly closely but what really ended up convincing him was the script written by Coetzee himself.
Although the story is universal in scope he acknowledges that the paramilitary forces who impose their reign of terror on a defenseless population were inevitably influenced by his own experience in Colombia. However he aimed to go beyond this impression and show that victims are just as capable of barbarism as the people who terrorise them.