The second public programme of the research project Zinemaldia 70. All possible stories will show the relationship between the San Sebastian Festival and censorship under Franco at an event open to citizens, to take place on Friday December 4 at the Tabakalera cinema. The event is organised by the Festival and the Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola (EQZE), with the sponsorship of Loterías y Apuestas del Estado. The Zinemaldia 70 project enjoys the collaboration of Tabakalera international centre for contemporary culture, the Filmoteca Vasca and Kutxa Fundazioa, and has the objective to generate a living archive of the Festival, whose first phase will culminate with the 70th edition in 2022.

The programme running on December 4 will look at the conclusions of the work carried out by researchers and students at the EQZE based on documents coming from the Festival archive and other collections, many of them hitherto unheard-of. While in the first year of the project activity, the research team explored the Festival’s evolution in the early years of the Transition (1976-1980), the cases studies will now focus on three censorship situations to have taken place between 1960 and 1971: the controversy surrounding the First Film Students Meeting in 1960, the problems suffered by the New American Cinema retrospective programmed in 1968, and the tense 1971 edition, marked by prohibition of the films Canciones para después de una guerra (Basilio Martín Patino, 1971) and Liberxina 90 (Carles Duran, 1970).   

Pablo La Parra Pérez, coordinator of the EQZE Research Department, joint head of the Festival’s Thought and Discussion department and principal researcher of the Zinemaldia 70 project, explains the Festival’s “complex” relationship with the mechanisms of censorship under Franco. “As an international showcase of the regime, the Festival represented a space of relative supervised opening: its programme included films that would take years to reach the commercial screens. However, precisely due to its strategic importance, control operations were also implemented within the event itself which not only followed the ordinary procedures of government censorship, but sometimes went much further”, he says.

Zinemaldia 70 has been prodigious in 2020 in its commitment to share the results of its research with the citizens. This public programme is accompanied by the University of the Basque Country Summer Course Critical approaches to film festivals: history, culture and politics which took place in September in San Sebastian, and the exhibition The Festival has had 24 editions. We don’t like it, running at the Artium Basque Museum-Centre of Contemporary Art in Vitoria-Gasteiz until December 8.

This initiative is part of the Shared Screen programme in its configuration as a Festival all year round. In October and November the short films by the female winners of the Festival’s 68th edition were programmed, representing the initiative’s first cinematic steps, and in December it will be the turn of the Zinemaldia 70 public programme. The activities for the first six months of 2021 will be announced shortly.

In 2019-2020, the members of the research team are: Arrieta, Irati Crespo, Noemi Cuetos, Diego Ginartes. Marcela Hinojosa and Sofía García Broca, under the direction of Pablo La Parra Pérez.

IMPORTANT Given that the session will last for more than four hours, a KN95 or FFP2 mask must be worn in order to enter the cinema.