Introduction

Welcome to a new edition of Zinegoak brimming with artistic and cultural proposals, by means of which we invite you to meet, reflect, enjoy and experience diversity, while fostering new imaginaries that contribute to social transformation. After celebrating its twentieth anniversary and changing dates, Zinegoak continues to be a space for visibility and vindication.

In this new edition, we want to emphasise the power of imagining and building our presents and our futures, and the need to do so not only individually, but collectively. These are the spaces we want to spread, build and inhabit, and which we have decided to call queer utopias or queertopias.

Spaces of vindication and legitimisation where diverse realities coexist, struggling to escape heteronormativity, patriarchy, colonialism, ableism and the multiple systems of oppression that operate across the planet. This is reflected in the image of this year’s poster created by the artist Dom Campistron, and in the entire programme of Zinegoak 2024, through the films in the Official Section, the short film cycles, the stage pieces, the Bilgune spaces and the ZG PRO industry, innovation and training space.

The experiences of a queer basketball team in one of the most depressed areas in Brazil (Levante, 2023), the story of the lesbian community that was forged on the island of Lesbos in the 1980s and is still going on (Lesvia, 2023), the interrogations that take place in political asylum processes in Switzerland (Die Anhörung – The Hearing, 2023), sexual awakening and polyamory (Vera and the Pleasure of Others), or the denunciation of LGTBphobia and empowerment to fight against it (Mavi Kimlik – Blue ID, 2022; Crossing, 2024) are some of the proposals of Zinegoak 2024.

It is also an honour to award our 2024 Honorary Prize to the Argentinean film director and screenwriter Clarisa Navas, one of the most promising voices in recent Latin American cinema, for her efforts to enrich our imaginations and our present, especially in a context such as the current one in Argentina, where our rights and our lives are in danger. Navas, through her films and her characters, shows us beings who refuse to be normativised and are capable of going beyond the norms that society imposes, beings who make possible and bring us closer to these queer utopias.

I would like to invite you to come and enjoy this new edition that the Zinegoak team has prepared with enthusiasm and effort, together with the support of many accomplices who make Zinegoak a space for meeting, reflection and awareness-raising.

Alaitz Arenzana Letamendi

Artistic Director