The lights go out and the film is about to start: as every year, people who work about 100 meters from Pikara Magazine's writing have come to the office to put their poster on the glass. The lights go off and the movie is about to start. The Queertopia that is cooked in our neighborhood, in the Bilbaíno neighborhood of San Francisco, about 100 meters from our writing, Zinegoak is coming!

A couple of weeks before the beginning of the festival we met in his office with Alaitz Arenzana, director of Zinegoak, and Julen Nafarrate, head of communication, surrounded by billboards of recent years: “I started working in the year of the Muxea cartel [a non-binary identity of cultural Zapotecs], eight years have passed,” “I remember Ane Pikarazaren’s poster a lot, I think it’s especially beautiful.” From these images we have begun to review the trajectory of the project that was born 21 years ago, between infusions and pastries.

Queertopia is the title of this year’s Zinegoak festival. Queertopias show that it is possible to establish spaces of relationship between different realities, diversity, creation and multiplicity of people create their own queertopias, spaces that we can feel and live as we really are: physicists, linked to a place (city or town), or to people (family or friends). Zinegoak claims this year the right and the ability to carry out his own queertopy as he understands: “Queertopias are not an ideal place, because there is a constant struggle, but they are spaces of existence and room. They're hard to build, we know, we're doing test tests, we're creating, putting on the table that there may be problems finding ways to deal with them," explains the director. As Aner Euzkitz said this week in Berria: “Yes, lifestyles, relationships, bodies, actions emerging from monogamous heterosexuality will be unsafe and will always fail, if not from one to the other. Yes, I fail, but always in a different way. What are we going to do to you! At least we'll take funny anecdotes out. Heterosexuality is always boring in the same way.”

Is film a queertopy or not? Arenzana asks the air and Nafarrate will certainly take the floor: “Well, I drink, it’s not a perfect queertopy for me, and it won’t be because perfection is boring and doesn’t exist. But for me, Zinegoak is queertopy. I come here and in my day to day I meet realities, experiences, ways of life, which I do not hear, see or live. That’s why we are here, at least I.”

Dom Campstron, author of the book Bekatorosas (Elkar, 2021) and member of cabaret Altxa Lili, has been touched to express these queertopias through lines and colors, author of this year's poster: “At cabaret Altxa Lili they have also created queertopia, the network, which has been a refuge, how to influence its surroundings,” explains the director Bilbaíno. “In addition, Bekatorosa has interviewed heterodious people from Baja Navarra in his work and one of the extracted topics has been the sexilium, that is, that people feel compelled to leave the village and to move to other larger places in order to be able to freely live their gender or sexual orientation to the cities. This year we have created for the first time a new cycle that will be called Sexilio. I think that Dom’s work goes the same way as ours and that’s why we decided to propose it”, added the Communications Officer. The illustrator explains to us through Instagram that he wanted to represent queer people on the poster, pulling some ideas created in the cabaret Levante Lili: “I’ve thought of them as complex beings, with more than defining those that appear and those that don’t appear, you can’t give them a label straight away. My idea was that it's falling at night and that in the line of cinema the guirnela gets into the movies. These two people are my predecessors and they are very nice. They look at me above my shoulder. For them there is something quite sexy: talking with them, getting entangled, getting to know each other, becoming friends...”

This year the Argentine filmmaker Clarisa Navas will be honored in Zinegoak. It is not the first time that this director participates in the festival, as in 2017 Navas presented his first feature, Today match at three. On the one hand, the fact that the ultraderecha is in charge in Argentina wants to deepen with Navas the influence he is having on the LGTBIQA+ struggle. And on the other hand, the governments of Javier Milei focus on the damage done to the film industry. Because, despite the uncertainty about what will happen as a result of the Basic Law, approved by the Argentine Senate on June 12, and the fact that its impact on the film world is not known for certain, the new government has already taken some steps: 231 people have been dismissed from the National Institute of Film and Audiovisual Arts in Argentina (INCAA) and aid to the sector that generates 700,000 indirect jobs has been frozen.

Navas, from the skin, the earth, emotion and feelings, works in a cinema located in a specific place, in the Province of origin: “In addition, we found his way of creating it interesting. Yaguá Pirú is part of the collective Cine and they bring forward the films in group. When it comes to making movies, he starts these cheeses, although he names them in a different way. The way to make movies is, in general, very hierarchical, very masculine. Navas is worried and works. At the moment we have many years of debt, so women or non-binary people are the ones who receive the honorary prize. When we still watch movies of fiction, most of them are men, we have to give opportunities for women to have room to make movies of fiction from elsewhere. The main awards are winning women nowadays and still most of the works are made by men”, said Arenzana, while we review the honors of previous years: Chilean Pepa San Martín, Argentina Valentina Carri and Mexican Angels Cruz, among others.

As we have said, Zinegoa is a project rooted in Bilbao and is also called outside here: Every year, they receive over 900 films. As they have received numerous works this year on cysheterodisident ways of life, they decided to organize a cycle called Queertopias, followed by its title. The works that are coming to them in recent years, in general, tell stories that go beyond personal recognition and highlight the political and social context behind them. From Zinegoak you try to put on the table and work on the issues that touch, move and move people: “I’m not saying that in our lives there are no dramas related to personal recognition, but in addition to the dramas we received eight years ago, there are different ways to turn the drama, opportunities, projects to make our life projects a reality. Eight years ago this barely appeared at the festival,” Nafarrate explained. Now, however, with the accomplices appear more often alternatives, making possible different realities in the way that each one can (with his friends, with his companions...), making each one his own way, but making the way. Illusion. Cheetomies. The Director Bilbaíno added that these changes to the topics are also reflected in the work. Because we're building relationship forms that come out of Heteronorma's rigid rules. “There are also the difficulties that this entails, but saying that they can be realized, not only in the difficulty, in the obstacles or in the inability to carry it forward.”

But they wanted to make it clear that just as LGTBIQA+ people don't have the same rights everywhere, in movies, too, position plays a fundamental role in ways that reflect these possibilities: “There is a film that tells the reality of Nigeria and there you will see the frustration of not being able to carry out that relationship because of the situation in which it is located.” That is, that queertopias are not ideal spaces out of reality and that our privileges and oppression within the system will influence our freedom of execution.

We also talk about the assimilation of the LGTBIQA+ group, the institutional assumption of the rainbow and Pridea. Pinkwashing. After sharing anecdotes and experiences we came to the conclusion that the LGTBIQA+ claim is understood as if it were only the demands of these dissident people by an important part of society, that is, it is not a matter of cysheteros, that does not question them. “They accept us and many like us, as if they were given a point, but then they don’t change their cyshetero dynamics,” from Arenzana. “There is the desire of the system to integrate us, but not to deconstruct anything. That is why it is important that we all agree, intersectionality, that we all feel challenged when there is a racist attack, that when there is a Basque Affob attack we do not feel attacked by the Basques alone and that when there are LGTBIQA+phobic attacks we do not feel attacked by ourselves. Creating a relationship between us is very important, we are all dealing theoretically with a racist ciisheteropatriarcal system, each from its scope, but all in the same direction,” added Nafarrate.

And what does fiction, in this case film, offer us to create everything we've talked about? What is it for? They spoke unanimously of the importance of the referents, of seeing them reflected, of seeing other realities and questioning their own, of dialoguing with what we see our reality and, perhaps, finding answers. Or create more questions. A space where we can take our desires and dreams out of the imagination and shape it, opening paths so that they can also be in the imagination of other people. Because imagination is the seed of raping the rigidity that reality often shows us, and fiction is a way to make dreams come true: “At least every year it helps me to look even more, and what I didn’t imagine other options, watching movies and talking to guests enriches my range of possibilities.”

With these last words from Julen I went down the street from May 2, from the bar Nervión to Bailén Street, at the height of Abando, to my village. A few months ago, I was reminded of the joint tour to the Borderline factory in Hendaia, on a rainy Saturday, to see the cabaret Altxa Lili. The illusion conveyed by the applause, screams and txistus of the spectators, the hug, the corner. I have also recalled a moment from last year’s Zinegoak presentation: With the departure of Kiki House of Anunnaki, the collective joy, the illusion, the hug, the corner that left the Arriaga Theatre. Cheetopy.

Now, at home, I've picked up the Zinegoak programming leaflet and I've started making the plan. Lesvia, Las mil y una, Transfariana, Everything is invented, Erreka Mari, Popperra Afterra Utopia, Bizi, Placer… The lights go off and the movie is about to start… Zinegoak is coming!