This year has been a hard year for Euskaraz Shielding. Izaskun Rekalde Abasolo has left us as a colleague and friend, for a disease as cruel as fast. Izaskun Netflix was one of the founders of the Euskaraz group and also dedicated itself to stimulating the birth of the Apps Euskaraz initiative. Their loss has conditioned our action in the second half of the year, as chairman of the association and spokesman for the initiative. But we have had no choice but to continue working as we could, because Izaskun would like that.

As for what in terms of screens brought us the year 2023, we started the year with a press conference on the Spanish Audiovisual General Law 13/2022. We explained that screens in Euskera, the Council and the Hekimen association, Basque institutions, RTVE and streaming platforms still do not comply with a number of legal provisions. However, thanks to the obligations that this law indirectly imposes on streaming platforms, giants like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video have begun to offer their contents in Basque. In September 2022, movies offered in Basque could be counted with one hand and today they offer 150 content on Netflix and 130 on Prime Video subtitled in Basque or in Basque in their catalogues. We hope that it will become more and more so and that the Basque institutions will also do their job, as the Government of Catalonia and TV3 are doing.

In February we denounced with the Observatory on Linguistic Rights the discrimination that Basques live in cinemas. In fact, data from 2022 in the hand only reached 1.99% of the cinematographic offer of Hego Euskal Herria. This percentage is even worse if the Northern Basque Country is included in this statistic. In Hego Euskal Herria, 751 films were premiered in Spanish and 15 in Basque, of them 11 films folded for children and 4 Basque productions.

It is precisely the Association of Independent Basque Producers Ibaia that denounced in May this year that the budgets for production have been frozen in recent years. The Basque Government allocates less than EUR 2.4 million per year to production subsidies, and 70% of that money goes to Spanish works. The river asked to double this figure and create its own grants for projects in Basque as a first step to improve the situation. Among the communities with a co-official language, Euskadi and Navarre are the ones with the least resources devoted to their own language, followed by Catalonia, Galicia and Valencia.

Fortunately, a pilot test was launched at the beginning of the year by various institutions and agents to tackle the bull from the sides and to give a way to the situation. The Commonwealth of Basque Municipalities UEMA and the Tinko Euskara Association tried to offer a weekly decent Basque offer for three months. The ZINUEMA initiative was a success, and according to the study carried out at the time of its assessment, it would only take EUR 1 million a year to guarantee a decent offer in Basque based on weekly releases throughout the year. Once again, an appeal to the Basque Government and the institutions. Moreover, from Apps Euskaraz we have said on many occasions that it is necessary to develop its own legislation to multiply Euskera in cinemas, to support and promote production in Euskera, as well as to establish quotas in Euskera to international distributors and cinemas, as established by the Catalan Film Law.

In May, at the conference “What would a Basque streaming platform bring us” organized by Euskaltzaindia in Pamplona, we once again raised the need for a Basque streaming platform as an absolutely necessary tool to recover the space that the Basque country has lost on screens during the last decade and to influence language habits. Fortunately, we learned, in the words of the director of ETB, that the platform they were working on, Bikain, would be in Basque. This has undoubtedly been the biggest breakthrough of the Basque Country in the audiovisual sector this year. The Basque platform presented in September offers hundreds of contents in Basque and is free of charge. We already have a tool to position Euskera in the digital audiovisual world. Now, the key is to constantly nurture attractive content and become the reference platform for Basques.

If we were to highlight a second achievement this year, the projections of the official section of the San Sebastian Festival in Kursaal, for the first time in history, have been offered with subtitles in Basque. Although there is still much to be done towards a balance between the two languages, the most massive audiovisual and media event in the Basque Country has been a genuine satisfaction.

Finally, I would not like to end this balance of 2023 without mentioning an initiative that has been a great illusion. Change the script for the Basque! the campaign was born with the support of many actors. The focus of the demands is slightly away from foreign streaming platforms and, using the close zoom here, asks the Basque Government and ETB for a series of measures to give real priority to the Basque country. In this regard, at the end of October the Basque Parliament adopted a declaration in favour of the audiovisual media in Basque, with a broad consensus between various aspects. It remains to be seen whether in 2024 they will move from words to deeds. We will continue to work, because in Izaskun, as you said, “ekine is baragarrie”.

Alex Aginagalde Lopez, spokesperson for Euskaraz Apantallamiento