The Gipuzkoa Provincial Council Department of Culture announces the second edition of the José Ángel Herrero-Velarde grants for researchers. At least one of these researchers must be a resident of or have been born in the province of Gipuzkoa. The aim of this programme, organised jointly by the San Sebastian Festival and the Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola, is to promote research into the Festival’s historical archives, generating completely new academic texts that take said archives as their main source and look back at the past of the event while enabling an ongoing dialogue with its present and future.  

The ultimate aim of the grants is the production of three completely new academic articles, which will be supervised by a committee of representatives of the institutions participating in the programme. The Festival will back the publication of the projects, and can act as an intermediary between the authors of the works and publishers or prestigious journals potentially interested in publishing them. These research texts may also be considered by the editorial board of the academic journal Zine: cuadernos de investigación cinematográfica published jointly by the Festival, the Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola and the Filmoteca Vasca.

"These grants represent an invaluable opportunity to delve into the rich history of the San Sebastian Fim Festival," said Goizane Álvarez, Deputy of Culture of the Provincial Council of Gipuzkoa. "We are pleased to support research and production of academic texts that shed light on the festival's past and its impact on film culture. This initiative reflects our commitment to the promotion of research and dissemination of Gipuzkoa's cultural heritage".

The grant is open to applications from people who were born or live in Gipuzkoa and or were born or have lived in the rest of Spain for at least two years. The project must indicate the research subject, methodology and sources, and be submitted with a letter of intent and their curriculum vitae. Applications must be submitted to the platform of the Festival archive website, where interested applicants can find the rules and all details of the call.

The period for submitting research projects opens on Friday, 15 March, and will run until 26 April 2024. The committee responsible for assessing and selecting the candidates will be made up of professionals from the San Sebastian Festival and the Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola. The three selected projects will be announced in May and their stay will take place from 8-19 July. 

Those submitting the selected works will receive a grant of 3,500 euros. In addition, during their two weeks of access to the Archive facilities, they will receive per diems corresponding to the days of consultation. The programme will also cover the travel and accommodation costs of beneficiaries who live outside Gipuzkoa.

During their stay in the Tabakalera building, home of all materials making up the Festival archive, the researchers will be assigned a space for work and consultation with Internet connection at the Filmoteca Vasca. They will also be guaranteed access to the film collections and archives located in and adjacent to the building and will have access to its facilities, resources and activities, including film screenings, workshops and master classes.

The works, which must have between 6,000 and 10,000 words, must be completed within seven months from the selection date, with the possibility of requesting an extension of no more than two months.

Almost 4,000 documents from the San Sebastian Festival archives (letters, photographs, posters, dailies, magazines, etc.) are available for consultation on Artxiboa website. In addition, this portal offers a catalogue of more than 34,000 items describing the materials available for examination on request by professionals, specialist teachers and researchers. Artxiboa contains digitalised versions of more than 3,000 photographs from the Festival’s own collection and those belonging to the Kutxateka; 724 copies of the Festival daily (now going by the name of Zinemaldia), of which issues are available from 1953 until today; some 350 posters from almost all its editions, and selected material from the General and Press Archives.

Regarding the projects selected for the first edition of the grants, the writer and programmer Felipe Cabrerizo looked into the film production of countries in the Festival’s socialist orbit; teacher Endika Rey looked at the event in relation to the feature films made by new moviemakers; the former student of the EQZE and teacher Neus Sabaté studied the reunion in San Sebastian between Josefina Molina, Pilar Miró and Cecilia Bartolomé; teacher Minerva Campos studied relations between the Festival and the FIAPF in its early decades; the critic and teacher Violeta Kovacsics made an in-depth study of the role played by the Festival in defining trends with respect to the aesthetic, narrative and political discourse of the Spanish films of the Transition; and Aida Vallejo, researcher and lecturer at the University of the Basque Country, proposed a look at the event’s socio-cultural history as a collective experience and place to meet and exchange ideas. A public programme will announce the result of the first three research projects in June.

The grants are named after José Ángel Herrero-Velarde Notario as a tribute to the member of the Festival’s management and selection committee, an essential figure in the last four decades of the event, who died in 2022.