The Department of Culture, Cooperation, Youth and Sports of the Gipuzkoa Provincial Council and the Elías Querejeta Film School joined as affiliates to i2basque.

Created and financed by Provincial Council of Gipuzkoa, Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola is opening in 2017 with a passionately regenerative spirit: its ultimate purpose is not to train technical staff by following traditional standardised training models, but to encourage the emergence of filmmakers with a comprehensive vision of cinema who are able to produce new (working, conceptual, creative, professional) realities on film.

EQZE is taking shape based on the fields of knowledge of the three agents that are taking part in its conceptualisation: the Basque Film Archive, San Sebastián International Film Festival and the Tabakalera cultural project . It is based in Tabakalera International Centre for Contemporary Culture where these institutions are also located.

The institutions involved in the development of the School are not teaching institutions but film institutions. This is why the School that they are promoting is also basically a film project: an idea of cinema that is taking shape as an educational project. This is the reason why the EQZE does not have a range of training programmes, but a single educational project made up of three postgraduate programmes: Film Preservation Studies, Film Curating Studies and Filmmaking Studies.

The unique nature of its origins and location, its idea of cinema and its teaching project make this centre an exceptional case internationally, which doesn’t prevent it, for the same reasons, from aspiring to become an aesthetic and professional laboratory for Basque cinema.

From 2019 the UPV/EHU recognises the postgraduate degrees as University accredited Master degrees. The courses run by the school will have the same academic value and (where appropriate) the same professional value as those run by internal UPV/EHU faculties and colleges.