Programme 2

Geratzen den hori
Aitor Gametxo Zabala, Spain, 2025, 18 min, DCP, Basque, Spanish subtitles and electronic English subtitles.
Introduction by Aitor Gametxo Zabala (filmmaker) and Margot Mecca (film programmer).

Years after his mother's death, Aitor Gametxo returns to a suspended memory, where absence begins to shape. The film addresses grief, caregiving, and legacy and it understands cinema as a space of active memory.

“Ni ate ondoan gelditu nintzan, geldirik, begira. Ez neban hurreratu nahi izan, ez neban irudi hura nigaz gorde nahi izan.” —I stood by the door, motionless, watching. I didn't want to get closer, I didn't want to keep that image with me.—

Aitor Gametxo returns, from the present and years after his mother’s death, to that moment suspended in memory, when the images of remembrance and the voice begin to blur; when the bond with his mother starts to shift and loss begins to exist even before the moment of death. The film summons what remains after her absence — objects, images, memories, small gestures, glances, presences that continue to inhabit the space of the house; hands that gently put on rings, old notes written by a mother — “I love you, my child. Lots of kisses.”

Through a variety of materials and narrative layers, but above all through an attentive gaze and sensitive form of accompaniment, Gametxo works with memory as something fragile and changing, never fixed, never closed. The film is constructed without drama, paying attention to small gestures, minimal actions, and a way of looking that cares and accompanies, allowing memory to endure.

Ekhiñe Etxeberria

Abortion Party
Julia Mellen, Spain, 2025, 13 min, digital, English, Spanish subtitles.

Introduction with Julia Mellen (filmmaker) and Margot Mecca (film programmer).

In an extremely comical, unfiltered monologue, Julia Mellen tells us how, at the age of twenty, she organised a party to celebrate her abortion, bringing together an unlikely group of neighbours and friends in Chicago.

A frenzied flow of words emerges from the director's close-up, filmed with her computer camera; the frame moves across the screen as we discover the story's setting, a deliberately shabby low-fi 3D model representing her house, the garden, the neighbourhood. A digital landscape where quotes, jokes, and surreal details accumulate in a display of the author's personal microcosm — critical, ironic, overflowing. With a provocative pleasure in storytelling, the film challenges both aesthetic norms and the imagery we generally associate with a woman who has an abortion. Reclaiming the vital unconsciousness of youth and the right to frivolity, Julia Mellen constructs an intimately political film that resonates with current affairs in the United States, the regression of women's reproductive rights, and the inequalities of American society — as the anarchist thinker Mikhail Bakunin apparently said, “a laughter will bury you all”.

Margot Mecca