José Antonio Sistiaga
Directing
Known For

Through interviews with different people linked to the work and life of the Basque sculptor Jorge Oteiza (1908-2003), this documentary aims to unravel fundamental aspects of his work.
1908-2008 y sigo
A compilation of animated shorts, by 36 animators from 36 countries. Each animator worked independently, but a single theme unites them all: animation has no borders. The compilation is set to the music of "The Internationale".
Animation Has No Borders

A dynamic visual journey through the films of José Antonio Sistiaga, for his paintings, of fruitful and relevant experience, for his erotic work, and their personal experiences and more endearing.
Imagined Landscape

Documentary about the history of experimental cinema in Spain. FRAGMENTS is a historical survey of “the other” Spanish Cinema — films that brazenly explored their artistic, poetic and conceptual potential. Spanish experimental cinema can be glimpsed in a series of important yet isolated events that FRAGMENTS compiles through various firsthand accounts, film excerpts and documents. For the first time in Spain, a documentary brings together the most relevant of a cinema that is slowly losing its invisibility.
Fragmentos para una historia del otro cine español

Sistiaga painted directly on 70mm film a circular (planetary?) form, around which dance shifting colours in a psychedelic acceleration matched by the soundtrack’s deep-space roar and howl. - Cinema Scope
Impressions from the Upper Atmosphere

A homage to painter Amable Arias. Through painted-on-film visuals, the film evokes the atmosphere of daytime in an imagined garden—paired conceptually with his earlier short Paisaje inquietante – Nocturno which reflects the nocturnal counterpart.
In an Imagined Garden

Han closes a trilogy that began with Ere erera baleibu... (1968) and continued with Impressions en haute atmosphère (1991), which goes from the microcosm of atoms (Ere Erera) to the macrocosm of cosmic galaxies. After an "informal" abstraction obtained through the projection of fine particles on a transparent film tape from which all notion of form is shunned, the artist reintroduced in his following movies simple shapes, circles and spirals, coils, reproduced according to the most traditional technique of movement decomposition (animation cinema), which "channels" Brownian motion of matter.
Han (on the sun)

An experimental film: dozens of pictorial techniques applied directly on celluloid; a work of impressive aesthetics that recovers certain ideas of abstract expressionism: endless chromaticism, constant mutations, the music of the cosmos, mysticism, synesthesia… and an enigmatic title that, although it imitates the phonetics of the Basque language, means nothing.
… ere erera baleibu izik subua aruaren…

Abstract sequences alternate between shadowy landscapes and nocturnal visuals, evoking unsettling atmospheres rather than a traditional narrative.
Haunting Landscape - Night

In the tradition of the painters of the Romantic movement, Sistiaga became interested in the question of transparency in painting, particularly starting with the painted film experiment ERE ERERA BALEIBU… The film evokes atomic matter imagined in full light; in 2022, following a 4K restoration of this film, the artist proposed an inverted version, as he had done at the beginning of the 1990s for his two films EN UN JARDÍN IMAGINADO and PAISAJE INQUITANTE-NOCTURNO. After all, is it light or dark between the atoms? A misguided question of an earthling!