Mr. Zineuskadi’s talent talent Gnea, a showcase of up-and-coming talent in the Basque Country, returned on May 29th with a slate showing a new generation of creators who are thinking beyond graduate shorts to series, genres, anime IP, and international industry routes.
Held as a talent day that brought together film schools, training programs, producers, and market experts, the event served as a live stress test for early-stage projects. Students and young filmmakers presented their work in front of a fiction jury consisting of Pedro Andrade from Labo Barcelona, Manuel Lacasa from Abyssin Lanza and Elodie Mellado from Firmin Programmer.
Other industry players include Rodrigo Ross from Iberseries & Platino Industria, José Luis Farías from Weird Market, and online participants Silvia Iturbe and Anabel Aramburu in collaboration with MAFF. Their feedback was both insightful and encouraging, pushing the filmmakers on structure, tone, production feasibility, and how their initial ideas would travel beyond the room.
For Gineuscadi director Mar Izquierdo, the event’s growth is visible both in the confidence of the filmmakers participating and in the nature of the projects presented. “We are experiencing change and talent understands the need to market to events and professionals, and to enter markets that are new to them, and we are looking forward to this initiative,” she said. “In the first edition, it was clear that we were actively looking for talent, but now Talent Day is something that they know is happening and want to be a part of.”
Izquierdo also noted that the quality of the projects has improved and the scope of the themes has expanded. “On the other hand, of course the standard is getting higher every year, but the most attractive thing is the theme,” she said. “Even though they are young, we can see that they care about topics like housing and evictions. And finally, it’s also important that comedy is back. We’ve been watching a lot of drama, but more and more we see the need for laughter…Maybe it’s the crazy world around us, but it’s reassuring to see young talent wanting to make us laugh!!”
If you can see the nerves, you can also see the ambition. Projects range from a Basque-Chinese adoption drama and an LSD black comedy set in a convent to a historical drama about female sailors set in the fishing village of Pasaia and a six-part jiu-jitsu drama rooted in Irun.
One of the most marketable presentations was “Tatami,” a six-part half-hour fiction series by Borja de Aguero, presented by Azuero Films and Rappers Studio. Set in a jiu-jitsu gym in Irún on the Spanish-French border, the project transforms a threatened sporting venue into a social drama about eviction, migration, police crackdowns, masculinity and chosen families.
De Aguero pitched the series as a study of violence, the visible physical kind of contact sports and the structural kind that shapes life off the mat. The ensemble includes a teacher from Brazil, a young Basque Maghrebi fighter, an African immigrant in his 60s, a female police officer, and a landowner’s adversary.
Animation provided the clearest IP play of the showcase. La Mola Studio’s Lau Maquedano and Natasha Barreto present “Soulmites” and “Night Forest,” a transmedia-oriented series with potential for games, books, graphic novels, augmented reality, and merchandising.
Created by McEdano, “Soulmites” is an expansion of his current short story “Bicho,” a 2D animated series about young people with inner conflicts in the form of small creature companions. Its protagonist, B, is a non-binary person with social anxiety who hides a bicho, an insect-like manifestation of his inner child. The concept has previously been presented in European animation environments, including Annecy, and was pitched as a YA story about mental health, identity, online hostility, and self-acceptance.
Barreto’s “Night Forest,” on the other hand, is a mixed 2D fantasy adventure planned as 10 11-minute episodes. The trio of a lone fox deer, an apprentice axolotl healer, and a red panda Viking journey through a darkening natural world, interweaving identity, belonging, and environmental crisis. This pitch was also the only pitch where the theme was played live on a ukulele.
The judges highlighted the international readability of animated projects, comparing “Night Forest” to the creator-driven Cartoon Network series “Adventure Time” and “Steven Universe,” and praising “Soulmites” as proof of how a short story concept can grow into a broader series universe.
Among fiction short stories, Ellen Mengyu Larinaga Bilbao’s “Hajiaku” stood out for its emotional specificity. Told in Basque, Spanish, and Chinese, the film tells the story of a young woman adopted from China by a Basque family, whose encounters with a Chinese woman and her daughter unravel questions about her origins, adoption, and the limits of her adoptive mother.
“El Silencio de Mari Puri” by Bernat A. Onsign and Nia Fernandez presented one of the most sophisticated short film pitches of the day. The drama is about a woman who realizes that her elderly mother’s sudden silence is not an illness, but a deliberate act tied to Spain’s unresolved historical memory and the mass graves of Medina del Campo.
This genre was a black comedy about nuns, LSD-laced communion wafers, and religious derangement, and was typified by La Santa Dévoción, a play on The Devils, Midsommar, and Climax. Meanwhile, “Batelerrak” recreates the history of female boat workers in Pasaia through a historical fiction project, which its creators see as an entryway into a larger work.
Other projects include “El asombro de lo improbable,” a romantic musical comedy in which a full orchestra appears around a man who falls in love. “Brindis por los perdidos”, a youth road movie by an 18-year-old filmmaker. and Hirabete, a Basque-language residential drama set in Bilbao’s Ribera de Deusto.
Jury responses throughout the day suggested that the most forward-thinking projects were those that were able to combine personal urgency with a clear production route. That means shorts that understand scale, series that understand audience, or animation concepts that are already thought of in terms of IP.
