film, he decided to improve this medium to pass over his pictorial strategies. He exhibited his first film in 1968 at the Bilbao Short Film Festival. Titled ... era erera baleibu izik subua aruaren ... (a nonsense phrase coined by Sistiaga's friend Rafa Ruiz Balerdi), it won a prize for best experimental film. This 10-minute short, hand-painted in a fairly conventional cartoon style, was later renamed De la Luna a Euskadi ("From the Moon to the Basque Country"). Thanks to the help of collector and patron from Navarra Juan Huarte, who created a film production company X-Films to produce films made by basque artists from the Gaur Movement (Balerdi, Basterretxea, Sistiaga), the artist began painting his abstract magnum opus in 1968. It took 17 months of 10- to 12-hour days to complete. The silent, 75-minute ... era erera baleibu izik subua aruaren ... was first exhibited at Madrid in 1970. The technique is hand painted film. Sistiaga used the same vocabulary of his paintings (lines, points, colour) onto the film celluloid and obtained random patterns of colored points that evokes the atomic matter or the "Primitive soup" of universe. Subsequent screenings took place in London, Paris, Barcelona and New York City. Each of the approximately 108,000 frames in ... era erera is completely unique, and appears onscreen for only 1/24th of a second. No optical printing techniques or special photographic effects were employed in its production.... era erera baleibu izik subua aruaren ... is the first feature-length example of "direct" cameraless filmmaking, a painstaking technique dating back to the early 1900s. Other well-known artists in the genre include Len Lye, Harry Smith, Norman McLaren (whose work Sistiaga cites as a direct influence) and Stan Brakhage. In 1972, José Antonio Sistiaga participated to the International Art Event Encuentros de Pamplona with painting and his films. Juan Huarte (patron of the event) commissioned him to shoot a film on the event where participated American composer John Cage, Steve Reich and European ones Luc Ferrari and José Luis Isasa. During this period, Sistiaga painted large paintings with curves, lines on white canvas Later hand-painted films and recent paintings In 1988-89, Sistiaga painted a new direct film Impresiones en la alta atmósfera ("Impressions from the Upper Atmosphere") in 70mm 15-perf horizontal format, intended for exhibition in giant-screen IMAX and Omnimax theaters. From the middle of 90's, the artist got a generous space in Antiguo