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).
Writer-director Marian Mathias presented her debut feature Runner in the Official Selection yesterday. It focuses on a young woman in the rural Midwest facing an uncertain future after her father’s death. With very
little dialogue but a profound sense of emotion left unsaid, Runner uses its stark landscape as a character to tell the story of a first love. At the press conference that the director gave in the Kursaal to discuss her film, flanked by her producer, Joy Jorgensen, she acknowledged the pictorial and cinematic references that people recognised in her films such as Edward Hopper and Terrence Malick, and said she felt humbled to be compared with them, but revealed that her influences were actually much broader and extended to genres like poetry and photography as well.
As well as explaining that sound was also a huge part of making Runner, she also stressed how she had aimed to make an atemporal film with no modern signifiers that could exist at any point in time, and that she had wanted to play with the way that many small towns in the Midwest feel stuck in time. As for her future plans, she said she’d love to work again with Joy Jorgensen who returned the compliment by commenting on how it had been a pleasure to work with a director with such crystalclear images in her head.