José Antonio Sistiaga

A Basque artist, he became well-known with his animation film Ere erera baleibu izik subua aruaren (1968-1970), the first abstract feature film in history, a silent film made by painting and scratching and manipulating the film itself by hand, using the "drawn-on-film animation" technique. Twenty years later, Sistiaga made another animated film without a camera, painted on celluloid, although this time with sound: the short Impresiones en la alta atmósfera, in which multicoloured circular shapes appear on the big screen one after another, acquiring a dynamism that in the inert aesthetic work could not be imagined.

His name appears in the history books as the founding father of the GAUR Group in 1965, which brought together the Magnificent Eight of avant-garde art in Gipuzkoa (Arias, Balerdi, Basterretxea, Chillida, Mendiburu, Oteiza, Zumeta, and Sistiaga himself), and he has also taken his place in the history of cinema as one of the most unusual and most interesting creators of painted cinema.