28/11/2025 - The director of the Basque festival talks to us about his professional experience and his ambitions to tie the event more closely to the city of Bilbao

(© Zinebi)

Joseba Lopezortega, who was appointed as head honcho of Zinebi in 2024, talks to us about his professional experience and his ambitions for the festival.

Cineuropa: You had already worked for Zinebi before 2024, correct?
Joseba Lopezortega: I started out very young at Zinebi: when I was 19, I was already part of the selection committee. That was a time when I had the chance to travel with the festival to other events and to get to know a time in which, in cinema, it was essential for juries to be present every day of the festival. They had to watch the films on celluloid. Festivals received hundreds of kilograms of films on reels. Cinemas smelled of cinema. In those days, I watched many thousands of short films.

Later, I ended up running the festival for two years, when I was 26 and 27, and then my life took a different turn: I became interested in synthetic and computer-generated images. I worked in that field for almost ten years in various museums. After a few years working in a communications company, which I closed because of the pandemic, the opportunity arose to return to Zinebi, and I said, “All right, I’ll come back, and I’m very happy to do so.” It was my home, and now it is my home once again.

What did you want to improve when you arrived in 2024, or this year?
What I found was a festival with many things already very clearly defined. For example, it works very seriously on gender parity, and that, obviously, I have respected and I am even trying to deepen. It is also a festival with a very curatorial discourse. This is a feature of many festivals – the more minority they are, the less open, the less generalist, the more curatorial and also the more likely they are to feel part of a circuit that works very well among festival specialists, but which creates certain problems in terms of connecting with cities. I think the festival’s curatorial discourse must be maintained, […] but around that international competition and that curatorial intelligence when it comes to choosing films, we need to build content and policies that make the city feel like it owns the festival. We cannot put on a festival that only satisfies connoisseurs and scholars, because cinema and culture are in urgent need of a dialogue with their societies.

Zinebi Networking has been overhauled this year, because you no longer separate Basque projects from national ones; the division is now between projects in development and those that are almost finished.
Yes, this is very important because the reality of Basque cinema today is not “Basque” or “non-Basque”. Yesterday, I saw a film produced with the participation of the Basque Country but directed by two Italian women. It is a Basque film, narrated in Italian, made by two Italian women, but with co-production and support in place. The reality of Basque cinema is that it is no longer a cinema whose main interest or focus is on whether it is Basque or non-Basque, in Basque or not in Basque, but rather that it is transnational. And this has to be reflected in everything. But I think the natural division is, for example, that documentaries should be grouped according to their stage of development.

Another change this year has been scrapping the ZIFF Zinebi International Competition for First Films.
We had a problem with that section; it was something I saw clearly when I arrived. Conceptually, I did not understand it. That section devoted to first films shone a light on, and focused on, the move outwards from short films. And I think we need to look the other way – that is, we need to try to get people to the point where they are making short films. Conceptually, it is better to work with schools than to work with first features. […] This does not mean there is no need to showcase feature-length documentaries, but they do not have to be in competition. Beautiful Docs is an important documentary section; I think there is a rationale for that section, and I think it is a mark of prestige for a documentary to be screened in such a carefully curated and elaborated strand, and next year, we will surely also try to include documentary features that passed through our own forum. […] Seeing them screened gives an enormous amount of meaning to our work.

What was the process of selecting this year’s Honorary Mikeldi recipients like?
The process was really lovely. I met Pablo Berger back when I was already on the festival’s selection committee. One day, he came up to me and said, “Hi, my name is Pablo Berger. So, do you like cinema?” I said, “Yes, of course, and do you, too?” Then he said, “Yes, I’m going to be a film director.” When someone says that to you, it always deserves the utmost respect, but it’s something that does not always materialise. The first thing I did last year when I arrived at the festival was to call Pablo and tell him I wanted him as an Honorary Mikeldi recipient, since he is someone with a very significant international, auteur-driven career. But he was in Japan. So I said, “Well, next year then,” and this year, it came to pass.

Something I wanted to do is to ensure there is always a female Honorary Mikeldi recipient. We have many women in the history of the Honorary Mikeldi, but they have almost always been directors. That also worries me because women do not only work in directing. This year, we have [producer] Esther García. She received the Grand Prize at San Sebastián; now she is coming to Bilbao to receive the Grand Prize of Bilbao! But I think people like Esther should get every prize, no matter who has given them something before. She is a great personality and, in my view, a person of international stature, both as a woman and as a producer.

(Translated from Spanish)