Ibai Fernández has never taken any courses in film or attended to any proper film school. His passion for movies came about in his very early childhood when his mother, in an attempt to calm down his natural born restlessness, repeatedly played for him the first three films that he had ever watched: "Alien", "Terminator" and "Predator".
Though young Ibai always had a disproportionate passion for cinema, it was not until the age of 9 when, exiting the theater after seeing "Pulp Fiction" during its launch, he asked his mother if cinema could be studied, in an academic sense. He was told they would look into it for potential post-high school studies but they found that a filmmaking education in Spain can be quite difficult and laborious, as well as quite costly. With all things considered, Ibai put cinema school on the back burner and instead began studying Audiovisual Communication at the public university in his hometown.
The Audiovisual Communication studies wouldn’t be useful for his filmic goals in the slightest but, because of the scholarships he was awarded due to his academic excellence, Ibai was able to study cinema abroad. First, he studied Intercultural Communication in The Hague, Netherlands. There he was unable to get in-touch with the filmic industry but, inspired by distance from his home, The Hague was the place where he would write his first scripts. Two years later, sponsored by another scholarship for academic excellence, he traveled to study at Missouri State University in Springfield, MO, USA, where he took on a major in media production and management, specifying in filmmaking related subjects. It was at MO State in 2008 where Ibai made his first short movie, titled "The Couple". The film was a big success among its audience and critics.
From that point on, as he kept on traveling and filming through different cities in Europe and North Africa, Ibai was able to shoot a wide variety of themes and subjects: he has written, produced and filmed TV news productions, publicity, music videos, industrial videos, artistic videographic creations, documentary full-length movies - some of them very risky to shoot (e.g. "The Common Enemy", filmed in the midst of the Tunisian Arab Spring) - and some other fictional short movies like "6:09", "2+2" and "The Print".
At the moment, he has quit studying at the Drama School in Malaga, Spain, where he had been studying acting for a year and a half, to seek a better living and new experiences in Quito, Ecuador. Ibai remains in Quito and now earns a living working as a film and art professor at the University of Israel as well as editing a documentary on "La Tri", the national soccer team of Ecuador (to be released at the end of May 2014).
At the time being, "2x2" represents the apex of Ibai's cinematographic work as it is the latest and greatest accumulation of his labor, created with the intent of being recognized in the movie making industry.
