People often ask me what I am working on. A work in progress is usually the answer to this great question. This is where you will find almost all the projects I am working on, though I keep some of them to myself. If you get the urge to collaborate with me, you can find me here.
A project that was born in 2018, in the artistic residency that I created Una Habitación Propia. 5 years later, with great enthusiasm, we continue to travel with the film around the world.
An eight-year-old child struggles with the fact that people keep addressing her in confusing ways.
During a summer in the Basque Country among the beehives, she explores her identity alongside the women of her family, who at the same time reflect on their own lives and desires.
A necessary story in our society, from Euskadi to Cannes.
Today Rita has an important meeting with her fellow singers: the women’s choir to which she belongs is in danger of disbanding because they have lost the municipal subsidy with which they used to rent their rehearsal space. However, one of the valley’s largest, highly polluting companies has offered the group a tempting sponsorship that would save the group. The women have met to deliberate whether or not to accept the company’s money.
From the first time I read Marina Palacio’s script, we at Gariza Films knew that there was something special and unique about the project.
Miguel (12) and his uncle Kechus (60) want to make a vampire film. In this attempt to create something together, reality and fiction alternate, a game that also shows the particular relationship established between child and adult.
Estibaliz Urresola is already part of the Gariza Films family and we are always delighted to be part of her audiovisual works.
Ane returns to her hometown for her grandfather’s unexpected funeral. Her return brings with it a tense reunion with the women of her family. Everything takes on a strange aspect when she begins to suspect certain anomalies on the part of the funeral service.
Thanks to Gariza Films, I have had the chance to become one of the producers of the film directed by Miguel Ángel Jiménez “Una ventana al mar”. A beautiful film about the right to decide what to do when the end of our life comes.
Faced with life-changing news, Maria, a fifty-five year old woman from Bilbao, decides to take a trip to Greece with her closest friends against the advice of her son and the doctors. A spontaneous decision leads her to the island of Nisyros, a small haven of peace and calm where she immediately feels at home. While exploring the beautiful island and immersing herself in its hidden treasures, she meets Stefanos and, against all odds, she fell in love. What seemed like a brief escape from reality soon turns into an unexpected opportunity to achieve happiness.
After our first experience as co-producers in Errementari we decided to go back to the pool with a story that we thought we needed to tell. So we became one of the production companies of the film, Vitoria, March 3rd. It is a film that has been supported by an entire city that we are currently producing with a lot of love.
In 1976, Franco’s death was still very recent and Vitoria was a quiet provincial capital – a city of “of priests and soldiers”. Few could imagine that year would be set the scene for dramatic events that would change the city. There are a few facts that also had an indisputable impact in the evolution of the so-called Spanish transition, especially in the Basque Country.
The tragic result is known: the murder of five workers at the hands of the police on March 3rd. It is a day that has been recorded forever in the collective memory of a city.
After directing ‘An Autumn without Berlin’, I decided take the plunge and become a producer at the helm of Gariza Films. The first movie we worked on as co-producers was Errementari, the directorial debut of Paul Urkijo. In addition, we worked on coaching an acting group of girls and boys. It was a wonderful experience.
According to the director Paul Urkijo, this project has been important in his life: “It is a rural story, about a blacksmith such evil that even the demons of hell fear him. “It was my favourite story when I was a child and I always wanted to adapt it to a movie”. The director from Vitoria-Gasteiz has been working on the project for four years and until this time has attracted, with his short films, 85 national and international awards.
In September 2018, I had the idea of encouraging the Bayandalai team to create a short film with images we had in the production company. Bayandalai was born From that first impulse, and today it travels around the world, telling the story of the Dukha people.
Inside a tepee lost in the heart of the taiga, Bayandalai, an old man of the Dukha people, ponders on the meaning of life and death in the largest forest on the planet. He is the last great taiga reindeer herder.
Maider Oleaga is a director of Basque cinema whose work I have followed for a few years. I am one of the producers of her new project. It is an honor to collaborate in such a personal and courageous project, carried out by a woman who deals with Elbira Zipitria.
In 2011 Maider moved to the second floor at number 26 on Calle Fermin Calbeton in San Sebastian, where Elbira Zipitria opened the first clandestine Basque school in the middle of the Franco dictatorship. Politician, speaker, teacher and fiery defender of the Basque language, she was as controversial as she was loved – a woman whose story is worth telling.