The Euskal Zine bilera de Lekeitio, the only film festival in Euskera, aims to reward the creation of short films. According to the organizers, the number of papers presented each year is higher, as well as their quality. They found it interesting to bring the topic to the Berbaldia round table organized within the festival: to talk about the current situation of the sector, to generate debate and exchange opinions.

According to Txema Muñoz, director of Kimuak, there is no industry. “The sector has only developed. In a time, what the students used to do their things has become an increasingly better field.” Muñoz has also provided data on the work in Basque: 8-10 short films are made in Basque “very good” a year.

The filmmaker and professor at the UPV/EHU Kepa Sojo highlighted that, as in the literature with the novel and the essay, “short film is a genre and many authors do not intend to make the leap into the feature film”. On the contrary, filmmaker Jon Garaño states that there are still those who do not care about the shorts and do them to make a long leap, “that is, without vocation, because they understand it or because the university forces them to do this kind of work”.

However, reality says that what has been done “reluctantly” is good. According to filmmaker Maider Fernández and member of the collective Las Chicas de Pasaik, the democratization of technology has greatly improved the quality of the works. Today, “they are all short or long films.” Therefore, how does the professionality and amateurism of the works classified by Euskal Zine Bilera differ? The four rapporteurs have recognised that this is a diffuse limit and that the nature of the work is marked by the productive model.

In addition to democratization, there are often bad shorts, Garaño said: “We can all make a short, but not a good short. The same thing happens in photography.” Mr Fernandez, for his part, has done some work without financial resources, but he claims that it is not possible to accept working without charging anything. In this sense, Muñoz has underlined the need to create industry, as “creating stable professional teams will be a prerequisite for ensuring the future of the sector”.