Zineuskadi Talent Day Spotlights Series, Animation IP
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- Zineuskadi's Talentuaren Gunea returned May 29, evolving from an initiative where organizers "were actively looking for the talents" to one where young filmmakers now know the event "will happen and want to attend," per head Mar Izquierdo.
- "Tatami" — a six-part, half-hour fiction series by Borja de Agüero with Azuero Films and Rappers Studio, set in an Irun jiu-jitsu gym on the Spain-France border — was among the day's most market-ready pitches, exploring eviction, migration, policing, masculinity and chosen family through an ensemble cast.
- La Mola Studio's Lau Maquedano and Natasha Barreto pitched "Soulmites" (a 2D animated YA series about a non-binary lead with social anxiety whose inner child manifests as an insect) and "Night Forest" (a 10-episode, 11-minute 2D fantasy adventure featuring a fox-deer, axolotl healer and red panda Viking) as transmedia IP with potential games, books, graphic novel, AR and merchandising extensions.
- Fiction shorts included Elene Mengyu Larrinaga Bilbao's trilingual Basque-Spanish-Chinese adoption drama "Haziak" and Bernat A. Onzain and Naia Fernández's "El silencio de Mari Puri," in which a woman's elderly mother's silence ties to a mass grave in Medina del Campo and Spain's unresolved historical memory.
- "La santa devoción" brought genre to the slate with a black comedy about nuns and LSD-laced communion wafers, drawing on "The Devils," "Midsommar" and "Climax," while "Batelerrak" recovered the history of Pasaia's women boat workers as a period fiction project its creators see as the opening to a larger work.
- The fiction jury comprised Pedro Andrade (Lab Barcelona), Manuel Lacasa (Abycine Lanza) and Filmin programmer Elody Mellado, with industry feedback from Rodrigo Ross (Iberseries & Platino Industria), José Luis Farías (Weird Market) and MAFF-linked Silvia Iturbe and Anabel Aramburu.
- Izquierdo flagged a thematic shift on the slate: "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."
Why it matters: For early-career Basque filmmakers, the event's shift from graduation shorts to series and IP pitches reflects a direct path to international industry buyers like Iberseries, Weird Market and Filmin — bypassing the traditional thesis-film pipeline. The animation projects explicitly positioned themselves as scalable IP universes (games, merchandise, AR), testing whether a small regional studio can compete in the European animation IP space where Annecy, Cartoon Network lineage projects like "Adventure Time" and "Steven Universe" are cited as benchmarks.
