Basque Talent Day Spotlights New Generation With Jiu-Jitsu Drama, LSD Nuns and a Ukulele

Zineuskadi’s Talentuaren Gunea, the Basque Country’s emerging talent showcase, returned May 29 with a slate pointing to a new generation of creators thinking beyond graduation shorts towards series, genre, animation IP and international industry routes.

Staged as a Talent Day connecting film schools, training programs, producers and market professionals, the event served as a live stress test for early-stage projects. Students and young filmmakers pitched before a fiction jury comprising Pedro Andrade of Lab Barcelona, Manuel Lacasa of Abycine Lanza and Filmin programmer Elody Mellado.

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Other industry links included Rodrigo Ross of Iberseries & Platino Industria, José Luis Farías of Weird Market and MAFF-linked online participants Silvia Iturbe and Anabel Aramburu. Their feedback was pointed but encouraging, pressing filmmakers on structure, tone, production feasibility and how early ideas might travel beyond the room.

For Zineuskadi head Mar Izquierdo, the event’s growth is now visible both in the confidence of participating filmmakers and the nature of the projects being presented. “We have experienced a shift, talents have understood the event and the need to pitch to professionals and the need to attend their first market, so they are looking forward to the initiative,” she said. “Obviously, the first editions we were actively looking for the talents, now, Talent Day is something that they know will happen and want to attend.”

Izquierdo also noted a rise in project quality and a broader thematic range. “On the other side, of course the level is higher every year, but, the most attractive part is the themes,” she said. “We can see how even if they are young, they are concerned about themes like housing, evictions, and last but not least, comedy is back. We have seen many dramas in previous years, but, more and more we can see the need for laughter… maybe is the crazy world around us, but it is a relief to see young talents wanting to make us laugh!!”

If nerves were visible, so was ambition. The projects ranged from a Basque-Chinese adoption drama and a convent-set LSD black comedy to a Pasaia fishing community-set period piece about women boat workers and a six-part jiu-jitsu drama rooted in Irun.

One of the most market-ready presentations was “Tatami,” a six-part, half-hour fiction series from Borja de Agüero, presented with Azuero Films and Rappers Studio. Set in a jiu-jitsu gym in Irun, on the Spain-France border, the project turns a threatened sports space into a social drama about eviction, migration, policing, masculinity and chosen family.

De Agüero pitched the series as a study in violence: the visible, physical kind of a contact sport and the structural kind that shapes lives off the mat. Its ensemble includes a Brazilian-origin sensei, a young Basque-Maghrebi fighter, an African migrant in his sixties, a policewoman and a landlord antagonist.

Animation offered the showcase’s clearest IP play. La Mola Studio’s Lau Maquedano and Natasha Barreto presented “Soulmites” and “Night Forest” as transmedia-minded series with potential extensions into games, books, graphic novels, augmented reality and merchandising.

“Soulmites,” created by Maquedano, expands from the short “Bicho,” now in production, into a 2D animated series about young people whose internal conflicts take the form of small creature companions. Its lead, B, is a non-binary person with social anxiety who hides Bicho, an insect-like manifestation of their inner child. The concept, previously presented in European animation settings including Annecy, was pitched as a YA story about mental health, identity, online hostility and self-acceptance.

Barreto’s “Night Forest,” meanwhile, is a mixed 2D fantasy adventure planned as 10 episodes of 11 minutes. Its trio, a lonely fox-deer, an axolotl apprentice healer and a red panda Viking, travel through a darkening natural world as the series folds identity, belonging and environmental crisis. It was also the only pitch with a live ukulele rendition of the theme.

Jurors picked up on the animation projects’ international legibility, with “Night Forest” drawing comparisons to the creator-led Cartoon Network lineage of “Adventure Time” and “Steven Universe,” while “Soulmites” was praised as evidence of how a short-form concept can grow into a broader series universe.

Among fiction shorts, Elene Mengyu Larrinaga Bilbao’s “Haziak” stood out for its emotional specificity. Told in Basque, Spanish and Chinese, it follows a young woman adopted from China by a Basque family whose encounter with a Chinese woman and her daughter unlocks questions around origins, adoption and the limits of adoptive motherhood.

“El silencio de Mari Puri,” from Bernat A. Onzain and Naia Fernández, offered one of the day’s most polished short-film pitches: a drama in which a woman discovers that her elderly mother’s sudden silence is not illness but a deliberate act tied to Spain’s unresolved historical memory and a mass grave in Medina del Campo.

Genre was represented by “La santa devoción,” a black comedy about nuns, LSD-laced communion wafers and religious delirium, drawing on “The Devils,” “Midsommar” and “Climax.” “Batelerrak,” meanwhile, recovered the history of Pasaia’s women boat workers through a period fiction project that its creators see as the opening to a larger work.

Other projects included “El asombro de lo improbable,” a romantic musical comedy in which a full orchestra materializes around a man falling in love; “Brindis por los perdidos,” an 18-year-old filmmaker’s coming-of-age road movie; and “Hilabete,” a Basque-language housing drama set in Bilbao’s Ribera de Deusto.

The jury response across the day suggested that the most advanced projects were those able to combine personal urgency with a clear production route: a short that knew its scale, a series that understands its audience, or an animation concept already thinking in terms of IP.