In partnership with Filmoteca de Navarra, A Bao A Qu presents a double bill aimed at young audiences: two shorts released last year, with the authors taking part in the session to talk about their creative processes, cinematographic choices and the wishes and needs behind their films. Mikel Gurrea through fiction, Lur Olaizola through a documentary packed with poetry, explore the value of words, the strength of youth, memory, the material, sensitivity.
Heltzear
Mikel Gurrea
Spain, 2021, 17 min, DCP, color, Basque.
Donostia/San Sebastián, 2000. The Basque conflict is still going on. As she writes a letter to her sister who is away, Sara, a 15 year-old climber, is in training for the most difficult climb of her life. The film explores, in a subtle, evocative way, the transition from adolescence to adult life, the strength and power of climbing as a sport, absence and silence. Heltzear premiered at the Venice Film Festival, where it was the first short in Basque to go into the official competition.
Zerua blu
Lur Olaizola
Spain, 2020, 15 min, color, DCP, Basque.
On 24th January 1954, Mamaddi Jaunarena boarded a ship in Le Havre bound for New York. She was 22 years old and all she knew was where to meet the lady for whom she was to work as a maid. The voyage took seven days and six nights. This could be the beginning of a story. Or a film. Because Mamaddi's journey begins in the cinema in her Basque village, Ortzaize, with images that leap out of the screen, enter her life and remain with her forever: a beautiful Cadillac, a young woman, the blue sky.