Anniversaries, even if the opposite may seem true, represent an excellent opportunity to re- examine the meaning of certain practices in an exercise of non-self-complacent memory. How were the initiatives now taken for granted born? What was behind their creation and what is their reasoning today? In what way has that early spirit changed over time, lending new meaning to its purpose?
Nest, San Sebastian Festival's section for film students, turns twenty (with a forgotten prelude we will address later). Today it is one of the Festival's liveliest sections and one of those to record the strongest growth. It also naturally includes a high number of women and a wide diversity of voices and narratives. But what lies behind the importance of generating these spaces for new talents at film festivals?
The commitment to training and seeking out talent is a strategic decision that defines a fundamental part of a festival's personality, setting it apart from other international events. The San Sebastian Festival also took up the challenge of telling its story with the inclusion of films by those who are setting out on their careers. Being a part of that early stage in the career of young filmmakers is a political gesture that represents a strong statement of intent: we believe in imperfect cinema, in participatory processes, in the corporeal existence of
ideas, in the performative nature of knowledge transmission.
A festival is a place where all sorts of things happen at the same time; sometimes they occur on the surface and have an immediate effect, while at others their development is slower and takes place on a second level. It is that unhurried time lending greater importance to the process of thinking about the image than concentrating on the actual image itself that this section preserves. These are places to experience failure, safe spaces offering the possibility to evoke the cinema of the future from the polyhedral perspective of a group of more than 80 people from different countries who come together for five days. At these meetings, films are imagined and networks are woven which will, sooner or later, culminate in improbable synergies. And that's when things start to move forward, because Nest is conceived, integrally, as starting point rather than a finishing line.
In this respect, Nest aligns itself with the idea of a conservatory, in as much as it preserves talent and proposes a first entrance door to the industry. It is also a vessel for thought on the
way contemporary cinema intervenes in politics; and a place from which to weave new narratives that reimagine the state of things. Another fundamental quality is that of its heterodox nature, that refusal to conform to the established rules which sits so well with the section.
Film festival programme structures have spaces which are more open to experimentation, which enable an enviable flexibility and which take the shape of permanently mutating laboratories. The films and moviemakers featuring in them have the ability to reinvent their meaning. Dialogue with them is invited and that collective conceptualisation lends shape to future meetings. A space is therefore generated on the basis of which the festival rethinks itself, amid a community of reflection enabling the event to question itself from another place. For instance, Nest was, from 2002 until 2010, a Film School Meeting, but the professors ended up gaining excessive prominence, something which the students resented, hence the change of tack by its name and meaning, turning the focus on students, where it has stayed ever since.
With the focus on filmmakers, Nest fosters the sustained creation of a pool of moviemakers which grows every year and whose members naturally return to the Festival with new works. It is a regular occurrence to see the participating filmmakers come back, either as part of the New Directors programme (recently: La última primavera / Last Days of Spring, by Isabel Lamberti, winner of the Nest Torino Award in 2015 with Volando voy; Chupacabra, by Grigory Kolomystev, participant in 2016 and 2018 respectively with Mary and Ya Ostayus/I'm Staying; and Africa by Oren Gemer, winner of an award in 2014 for the short film Greenland), or with a developing feature film project in the work in progress sections. Moreover, filmmakers like Jerónimo Quevedo, Kiro Russo, Léa Mysius and Teddy Williams, whose first or second works premiered in the Nest section, have gone on to tour the international festival circuit, where they have garnered numerous awards. The Ikusmira Berriak residencies programme is yet another way of returning where many of the filmmakers to have participated in Nest have gone on to develop their projects.
By dedicating a privileged space to learning processes, the San Sebastian Festival merges with the spirit of Tabakalera-International Centre for Contemporary Culture. Together they provide a habitat for shared knowledge and practices whose conception embraces the idea of a crafted approach to cinematic creation. Since 2008 the collaboration of Tabakalera in rewriting and organising Nest has been essential; shared reflection and joint work have enabled the exploration of new routes to consolidate the character and reach of the meeting. Growth has been notable not only with respect to audience attendance, but also to the number of participating schools, short films submitted, guests and activities. The importance recently acquired by the section is partly due to the synergy between Tabakalera and the Festival. The potential for exploration appears to be unlimited; at Tabakalera there is a film school, a festival, a cinema, an artists' residencies, labs, workshops, galleries and a film archive.
Within this apparatus, the students presenting their films in Nest coexist with post-graduate students at the Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola, who in turn participate in residencies such as Ikusmira Berriak and later return to the school as the tutors of projects by new generations of students whose films will be part of future editions of Nest. The possibilities of the meeting are endless within a design precisely devised to favour these germinations between different projects with so much in common. The school only makes sense in this space; Nest only makes sense in this building; cinema only makes sense within this project. The importance of keeping them together is key, the physical proximity enabled by Tabakalera's pivotal landscape provides immediate access to a whole series of stimuli and creative possibilities which would be inconceivable were they not to take place on the same site.
The academic and researcher Mette Hjort refers to that key interconnection in the generation of new dynamics. "With access to various interlinked film industries becoming ever more competitive, film festivals (...) have emerged as places where the creation of networks and training combine decisively for the success of the aspiring filmmakers"1. Aida Vallejo, anthropologist, researcher and doctor at the University of the Basque Country, precisely gives the example of the synergy existing between the school and the Festival in her study of film education projects at Ibero- American film festivals. She considers the Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola (EQZE) to be a pioneer initiative –promoted by the Provincial Council of Gipuzkoa– which takes the collaboration between festivals and educational authorities a step further. The Festival sits on the academic board, alongside Tabakalera and the Filmoteca Vasca. "The channels of collaboration between the festival and higher education facilities extend to the festival's active participation in a post- graduate university programme, the inclusion of its activities in the school curriculum, and offering privileged access to its training possibilities"2.
The fact that a non-specialised competitive festival is part of such a fine creative ecosystem is extraordinary. And therein lies the key to the success, not only of Nest, but of the coherence with which the San Sebastian Festival accompanies this commitment as the cornerstone of its identity, and how that strategic decision influences the festival of the future.
The importance of film students meetings in Spain dates back to Franco's times, with widely analysed proposals such as the 1955 Salamanca conversations and the 1st International Film Schools Conference at Sitges in 1967. Among these key moments in the generation of debates and the drawing up of radical manifestos, the 1st Film Schools Conference took place at San Sebastian Festival in 1960. This first meeting is, in fact, the germ of Nest and, despite constituting a landmark for a whole generation of filmmakers, has received practically no attention in specialised literature to date. As mentioned above, anniversaries give us the chance to take a self-critical look back at our origins. Why has this prelude so fundamental in the history of San Sebastian Festival not been told?
In Spain under Franco, with all of the threats and limitations imposed by the regime on filmmakers, the Conference assembled a group of students – among them Basilio Martín Patino, Antxon Eceiza and Joaquim Jordà – who proceeded to participate in a series of conversations that would have far-reaching political consequences for daring to criticize the dictatorship's cinematic apparatus and condemn the prevailing film culture in Spain. Thanks to an exercise of reconstruction based on the San Sebastian Festival archive in the framework of the Zinemaldia 70: all possible stories project, we can conclude that what happened in San Sebastian at those early conferences was determinant for approving the new censorship code in 1963, and for laying the way towards that optimistic outlook which would permit small steps to be taken in the following years.
Let's not forget the national context in the 60s: the Instituto de Investigaciones y Experiencias Cinematográficas (Institute for Film Research and Experience, IIEC) created in 1947, gave way to the Escuela Oficial de Cinematografía de Madrid (Official Film School, EOC). Meanwhile, 'the new Spanish cinema' appeared and all sorts of grants were created for films directed by students at the School. In Spain, from 1962 to 1968, 48 directors made their debut after having studied at the EOC. The rebellious atmosphere and access to forbidden films became the norm.
As pointed out by Luis Vaquerizo García, the movement emerged as a small island of intellectuality in a medium compelled to shun commitment. "The induced rickety condition of its birth and its exceptional nature are the fundamental reasons for the ephemeral, residual and rather indeterminant nature of subsequent cinematic representations. Its necessity stemmed from strategic factors, far removed from the interests of film directors"3. Despite being a liberalisation limited and regulated by the dictatorship, those years saw a number of foundations being laid for the future possibility of certain changes. Authors like Carlos Saura, Mario Camus, José Luis Borau, Basilio Martín Patino, Manuel Summers and Miguel Picazo shot their first films.
In the Basque Country, the film club culture was in full swing. Regular movie-goers in the San Sebastian of that decade were Víctor Erice, Antonio Mercero, José María Zabalza, Elías Querejeta, Antxon Eceiza and Luis Gasca, all of whom had a strong interest in raising the intellectual and cultural bar of the San Sebastian Festival. That context had a direct effect on organisation of the 1960 Conferences. Basque film production was starting to endorse a cultural identity different to the one drawing an approach to experimental and documentary cinema. One clear example lies in the emblematic work Ama Lur, by Néstor Basterretxea and Fernando Larruquert, in 1968.
Another five editions of the school conferences would be held until 1966. Following a long break, of 36 years, the first edition of a second stage was held in 2002, designed and developed by José María Riba, who was a member of the San Sebastian Festival Executive Committee. This recovery meant returning to the idea of the need to build bridges between the new creators and the industry. It was also characterised by the desire to include very different schools and profiles, from an initiative of film workshops in the Basque Country to the ESCAC (Barcelona) and the ECAM (Madrid), La Fémis (Paris), the ENERC (Buenos Aires), the Escuela Internacional de Cine y TV-EICTV (San Antonio de los Baños, Cuba), and a film school for children, Orson the Kid (Madrid), among many others.
The idea was to gain the allegiance of the filmmakers and to foster the coming together between students and professionals, to add theory and practice to an exercise which, as defined by Duncan Petrie, sometimes generates a false dichotomy in certain academic programmes. "Courses focussed on production must endeavour to combine hands-on filmmaking and an intellectual framework that embraces the theory, criticism and history of cinema, providing students with a context for locating and understanding their own creative practice"4.
The San Sebastian Festival decided to devote itself to providing that context at a time when film festivals were proliferating disproportionately, and when defining the key factors that characterise and create the need for a cinematic event was urgently required.