This year the Filmmakers' Dialogues will take place in the Santa Teresa Convent in San Sebastian's Old Town due to renovation work underway at the Koldo Mitxelena Kulturenea. This edition, the programme will focus on its pedagogical slant, offering the possibility of taking an in-depth look at the different subjects. Thus, anyone wishing to do so – free prior registration – can attend the Week-long programme running from 8-11 April, including screenings and other activities related to the profession of programming. Another activity, with limited places, is the workshop led by the archivist, moviemaker, writer and educator Rick Prelinger, taking a practical look at how audiovisual archive footage is managed and edited. Prelinger will spend the week working with the participants, using footage from local archives to make a collective documentary about the territory at the end of the workshop.   

In addition, those registering to attend will receive two invitations for the Official Selection or Velodrome screenings at the 72nd San Sebastian Festival. And the first 30 people to sign up will also receive a copy of the San Sebastian Festival publication.  

Registration, which opens today and runs until 8 January, is free of charge and open to all citizens, from students to film buffs (https://gip.eus/zinema). To encourage in-person participation and highlight their nature of meeting places, the sessions won't be available in streaming mode. However, their recordings will be available on the Koldo Mitxelena Kulturenea and Festival websites at the end of the season.

The programme aims to provide movie fans with new keys for better understanding the behind-the-scenes aspects of producing and making a film. The Filmmakers' Dialogues, with their user-friendly discussion format, serves to explain the intra-history of film creation. All of the conversations approach the cinema as a collective profession. Each filmmaker will be accompanied by one of their regular collaborators in different fields (editing, acting, writing, production) or other filmmakers from their same generation, starting point or formal and subject preferences. 

The programme for the edition is as follows:

• Collective directing. The Negu Collective (January 9)
• The cinema and other disciplines. Víctor Iriarte Carlos Muguiro (February 13)
• Debut films. Elena Martín, Laura Ferrés Javier Macipe ( February 27)
• Literary adaptations: Isabel Coixet Sara Mesa (March 7)
• The state of animation: Isabel Herguera Pablo Berger (date to be confirmed)
• Writing cinema: Belén Funes Marçal Cebrián (May 7)
• Producing films: J.A. Bayona Belén Atienza (date to be confirmed)

All of the sessions will take place at 19:00 in the Function Room of the Koldo Mitxelena Kulturenea Santa Teresa Convent and are free of charge.

In addition to shifting the focus from the sole figure of the filmmaker, the aim is to discover the traditional professions involved in developing a project and, therefore, to learn how to watch and read films critically, in a context whose circumstances are prompting them to mutate in all possible directions.

This commitment to film by the Koldo Mitxelena Kulturenea corresponds to the centre's main lines of work: debate, discussion and knowledge. Here the core initiatives are to support, promote and circulate audiovisual projects. And here too we must mention the myriad of actions developed by the Department of Culture at Gipuzkoa Provincial Council. These include creation of the Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola and scholarships for the school, the Lanabesak grants – which have provided backing for more than 113 long-term audiovisual projects since 2017 – and incorporation of the Provincial Council to the San Sebastian-Gipuzkoa Film Commission.