La financiación autonómica de la industria cinematografía en la década de los ochenta: un acercamiento al cine político vasco

Abstract

In the 1980s several key issues converged to prompt the appearing of movies targeting the terrorism matter. This was facilitated firstly by the surging of extremist groups and their terrorist acts as a way of fighting, secondly by the need of European countries to promote their own cinematographic industry in order to compete with the US one. Meanwhile in Spain the democracy was recently born and an Autonomic territory system was established. Cinema was considered as one of the most suitable instruments to show their diversity and different identities. The Basque Country was the one that promoted the most their own movies production, whose Government conceded generous budget to promote Euskadi’s cinematographic industry. The filmmakers took advantage of such opportunity the let the world know one of their priority concerns: terrorism. One out of four movies supported by the Basque administration during that decade was related to this topic. In this article we analyze those movies using data from the General Archive of the Public administration of Euskadi Autonomous Community, which has provided non-previously released data to know better the administrative process and both the Basque and the Spanish reality of those years.