Programme 4

A group of friends set out on a hike to climb Mount Ulia, in San Sebastián, and admire the Bay of Biscay below them. As they walk further into the trees, we hear readings, songs, whispers in two ancestral languages, Quechua and Basque, twinned in a ritual. Muyurina - Itzuli Mitzuli is a ceremony-film, loaded with symbolism without letting go of its lightness, as nature takes centre stage, intertwining with both cultures, wrapping them up, as if both really emanate from it, like the primitive and primordial culture that it is.

A little more than 100 kilometres from that point, in the village of Urroz, there used to be another, very different type of ritual bound to the land, called ‘año y vez’: a traditional way of farming the land by dividing it in two (harvesting one and leaving the other to lie fallow). Año y vez is also a harvest-film which follows the cycle of the countryside, from sowing to milling, from milling to animal feed, or from the animals to leather or wool. A participative film, with collective and inter-generational authorship, which attempts to look to the future and show us our continual transformations of how we farm the land and nurture generations to come, allowing knowledge to be passed down.

Miguel Zozaya