A drama that is at once political and exquisitely intimate first ripples and then symbolically explodes in the timeless quiet of a village in northern Spain, deep in the Basque Country. An unnamed young woman – a girl, really, who still misses her parents – waits and waits for her handlers to get her across the border to safety. The time is 2011 and, as we hear on the radio in one of Negu Hurbilak’s unusually clear moments, the fighters for Basque independence have just announced to the world the end to their armed conflict.
This is about all the concrete information furnished by the four filmmakers — Ekain Albite, Mikel Ibarguren, Nicolau Mallofré, Adria Roca – who are part of the Negu Collective, a group that has the two short films Erroitz and Laiotz under its belt. The audience is left without enough information to really understand who the girl is and why she is escaping, or who is helping her and why. It is not the stuff commercial thrillers are made of, obviously, but the film is likely to mystify even well-intentioned festival audiences outside Spain, though local viewers will probably catch more references and fill in more pieces of the what’s-going-on-here puzzle.
This rigorously lensed story, set in a perennial haze created by the mists and clouds enwrapping the scenic mountain village of Zubieta, bears some striking similarities to another, much more accessible Spanish film also playing in competition at the Mediterrane Film Festival: Jaione Camborda’s The Rye Horn, about a midwife forced to flee Francoist Spain. She, too, finds shelter, kindness and understanding from simple villagers who offer her their solidarity in exile. Here the girl, played with humble politeness and few words by boyish young actress Jone Laspiur (Ane Is Missing) is passed from hand to hand for a brief stay in hiding. The remarkable thing is that everyone who gives her shelter, clearly at great risk to themselves, is utterly unremarkable. A young man who works at a lumber yard, an older woman who lives on her own, a shepherd who has lost his family somehow. All local people of few words, who often don’t answer the girl’s simplest questions.
There is also a handler, in charge of driving her to different refuges, who finally gives up trying to get her across the border which she can see with her naked eyes. Why doesn’t he walk her across, one wonders? Is her inability to move forward symbolic? The radio mentions a trial of members of ETA, the Basque separatist movement that used terrorism in its campaign for independence. Is she the missing defendant? The characters are not saying.
Watching this slow-moving but visually very beautiful film, one has a sense of participating in the girl’s dilemma of imposed stasis, a painful restriction of movement without a clearly voiced cause. Like in one of the more abstract John Le Carré books, the drama feels urgent, the danger is present, but there is no movement forward – no future, in short, just an endless waiting for some undefined situation to change.
And then it happens. Something changes, radically, and is visualized as an explosion of demonic primitive energy in a wild local carnival involving the whole village. The filmmakers mingle with spectators in this unstaged event where men in devils’ masks (and sometimes little else) burn and rampage to let off steam. It appears their lowest and most violent instincts get the best of them: they even set the old village palm tree on fire, a shocking sight.
Directors, screenplay: Colectivo Negu: Ekain Albite, Mikel Ibarguren, Nicolau Mallofré, Adria Roca
Cast: Jone Laspiur
Producers: Mikel Mas, Ritxi Lizartza Urrestaratzu
Cinematography: Javi Seva
Editing: Edu V. Romero, Ekain Albite
Production design, costumes: Justina Montserrat
Production companies: Cornelius Films (Barcelona), Maluta Films (San Sebastian)
World Sales: Begin Again Films (Madrid)
Venue: Mediterrane Film Festival (Competition)
In Basque, Spanish
90 minutes
