As restorations go, the Basque Film Archive’s work last year on Tasio could be described as an unqualified success. After taking a bow at Cannes and then opening the San Sebastián International Film Festival’s inaugural classics programme, Montxo Armendáriz’s 1984 film – which chronicles the life of a charcoal burner in the Basque Country in the early 20th century – has travelled widely, attaining acclaim at screenings in 40 cities across the world, ranging from Los Angeles to Luanda.
“Tasio is very good in showing the idea of how to give films a new life,” says the archive’s director Joxean Fernández in an interview with The Film Verdict. “The film went to Cannes Classics and was then shown at Il Cinema Ritrovato [in Bologna]. Then we went home, 40 years after its premiere at San Sebastián, and then on to the Lumiere Festival [in Lyon]. Tasio showed us the way about how we shouldn’t just restore films people already know, but also films people could discover.”
True to his word, Fernández and his team had taken up an even bigger challenge this year. Rather than zeroing in on yet another feature, the archive had opted to work on four relatively uncelebrated medium-length films from 1985-86: Xabier Elorriaga’s Zergatik panpox, about a woman’s travails from youth to single motherhood; Alfonso Ungria’s Ehun metro, which revolves around a fugitive ETA activist’s recollections of his life; Anjel Lertxundi’s Hamaseigarenean aidanez, a two-parter about a chronic gambler and his long-suffering wife; and José Julián Bakedano’s Oraingoz izen gabe, about the deadly love triangle between two brothers and a sex worker they brought into their home.
Apart from their lengths, what cast these films apart from Tasio will be their language. While very much celebrated for its depiction of Basque culture and traditions, Armendáriz’s film was made in Spanish – something the filmmaker took quite some flak when he made the film four decades ago. In contrast, the four mid-length films bowing at San Sebastián this year were all made in Basque.
“Tasio is a great film, and we love it, but this time we’d like to show a film made in Basque,” said Fernández. The international reach of the screenings might not work like Tasio did, he admitted, “but this another different kind of initiative… it’s an encouraging, small project which highlights the presence of Basque-language cinema.”
Similar to the process in restoring Tasio, the archive retrieved original negatives from the archive and the Spanish Film Library, and commissioned the Bologna-based L’Immagine Ritrovata to restore the films. “And the filmmakers are all alive,” said Fernández. “I called them and they agreed to go to Bologna to help us with this, and it gave the restorations a legitimacy.” He’s not wrong: the restorations are pristine without being too refined for their time, with the texture of the era being more or less retained.
More than that, the selection also highlighted the crossover between Basque literature and cinema, with three of the four films being adaptations of Basque novels. While Oraingoz izen gabe was based on Argentine novelist Jorge Luis Borges’s story “The Intruder”, the film itself is a radical localized reimagination of the source material, with screenwriter Bernardo Atxaga relocating the narrative from a Buenos Aires suburb in the late 19th century to a village in the middle of the Basque countryside in the 1980s.
According to Fernández, these short films are significant as they represent the burgeoning of an indigenous and independent regional cinema after years of suppression and stagnation of Basque culture under Francisco Franco’s fascist regime. The end of the dictatorship in 1975 and Spain’s transition to democracy ushered in what is now known as the “Debates on Basque Cinema” in 1976, with activists, academics and artists proclaiming the very politicised need of “inseparably associating Basque cinema and the Basque language”, the archive director wrote in his seminal book on Basque cinema.
While a few filmmakers like Antxon Ezeiza did manage to forge ahead with features, the lack of resources and a well-established infrastructure had forced directors – especially younger ones – to work on short films. It would take the Basque Government’s enactment of cinematography laws and the establishment of production incentives, plus the launch of the Basque public broadcaster Euskal Telebista, for Basque-language cinema to bloom in the mid-1980s. (It is no coincidence that the archive’s restoration programme was completed with support from the government and the broadcaster.)
The four films were representative of “a new cinema being born”, Fernández said, pointing to how the filmmakers would eventually pass the baton to a later generation of Basque filmmakers – among them Julio Medem and Alex de la Iglesia – who would eventually rise to international prominence with their wildly diverse films.
“We suffered a lot during the dictatorship, when we were not allowed to speak our own language – but we are now winning this battle, so we obviously have to take care of our own language,” said Fernández. This conversation about past clampdowns and censorship remains more relevant than ever, he added, at a time when certain politicians have called for whitewashing past dictatorships – a reference, perhaps, to the Spanish far-right’s attempts to revise Franco’s legacy.
Somehow, the restorations work in tandem with the San Sebastián International Film Festival’s own efforts to advocate more awareness among the younger generation about the perils of authoritarianism. In a section titled “Youth, Cinema, Memory and Democracy”, the festival will screen Patricio Guzman’s Chile, Obstinate Memory, Jean-Gabriel Périot’s reenactment of activist films in Our Defeats, Pablo Gil Rituero’s The Drunkmen’s Marseillaise (about an artistic collective’s clandestine collection of protest songs in Francoist Spain in 1961) and David Varela’s An Impossible Sky (in which young people are asked to read and reinterpret the records of fighters on both sides of the political divide during the Spanish Civil War).
Just as importantly, the festival will also host a screening of Basilio Martin Patino’s Songs for After A War, a 1971 documentary which was banned by the authorities and finally released in 1976. This programme was co-organised by the festival with the Commission for the Holding of the 50th Anniversary of Spain in Freedom, a body set up to mark the end of the Franco regime in 1975.
“The festival has to be a place where we can talk, that we can have dialogues to express films in a free way,” said Fernández, who is also a member of the management committee of the San Sebastián film festival.
The festival also serves as the platform for the archive’s further public outreach, he said. The four restored Basque-language medium-length films will tour the Basque Country from October to December, with screenings at Bilbao, Vitoria, Pamplona and the French city of Saint-Jean-de-Luz.
