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).
Four years have gone by since Manuel Martín Cuenca last directed a fictional film. After competing in 2017 for the Golden Shell with El autor, he is back at the Festival in the Official Selection, out of competition, with his latest project La hija. The director explained that what interested him about the original story was the moral ambiguity that the characters had and from then on he decided to take it onto his own terrain. Javier Gutierrez who plays the role of an educator at the centre for juvenile offenders that a pregnant teenager escapes from, said that he thought that La hija was a love story but that in the name of love they commit atrocities. He also stressed the meticulous preparatory work that Manuel Martín Cuenca had done with his actors, mentioning how he considered the script to be something like a kind of map that guided them and left a space where the characters could really flow.
Another aspect of his film that Martín Cuenca drew attention to was the importance of the locations in his films, as he claimed that for him, the landscape is always just another character. “In my feature films the first thing is the landscape and then comes the story”.