• LUIS MARTÍNEZ

    Saint Sebastian

Updated on Sunday, 19September2021-01: 47

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  • Review.

    'Maixabel' moves from the raw simplicity

  • Inauguration Zhang Yimou and the dignity of the corny inaugurate a decisive San Sebastian Festival.

Far from

Icíar Bollaín (Madrid, 1967)

the temptation of too clean hands. Since making her directorial debut in 1995 with '

Hello, are you alone?'

He has never been afraid to build each of his films from the certainty that cinema stains and changes things. For good. His latest film is the best and most controversial of the examples. The story of Maixabel Lasa, the ETA victim who did not give up until she came face to face with her husband's murderer, is brought to the screen with the clarity of mud: it is about staining to come out cleaner. '

Maixabel

' was presented on Saturday in San Sebastián with the rumor at its side of the event.

Last year the San Sebastián Festival programmed '

Patria

' on its star day, this year it does the same with '

Maixabel

'. What happens right now that didn't happen before? Nothing comes up suddenly. I was asked to make the film three years ago. Even long before I was presented with a script around an ETA victim, but it was pure fiction. It was a generic ETA, so to speak, who was with his victim. It reminded me of an article that I read years ago and it left me very shocked: how is it possible that someone feels with the person who has done them so much harm? That first proposal began and ended in the meeting simply. I thought it had to be a more complete story. If we don't tell who these people are, the film doesn't acquire, I think, the right dimension. Both on one side and the other, the character was missing ... That's it. It wasn't until I learned the real story of Maixabel Lasa that I finished watching the film.The original question wanted to be more general. The passage of time is important. These 10 years that have elapsed since the end of ETA provide the necessary distance. And, furthermore, now, as Maixabel says, the story remains. Now the question is: how do we tell what happened? For example, I see in my house that younger people do not know what ETA is or what happened. It terrifies me to think that they want to forget those five decades of horror and that the new generations do not know anything about it. And then, this is a matter of coexistence. I come from abroad and I can theorize with it, but in the Basque Country people live with what happened, it is very present. Without going any further, they continue to pay tributes to the ETA members and the victims have to endure it.These 10 years that have elapsed since the end of ETA provide the necessary distance. And, furthermore, now, as Maixabel says, the story remains. Now the question is: how do we tell what happened? For example, I see in my house that younger people do not know what ETA is or what happened. It terrifies me to think that they want to forget those five decades of horror and that the new generations do not know anything about it. And then, this is a matter of coexistence. I come from abroad and I can theorize with it, but in the Basque Country people live with what happened, it is very present. Without going any further, they continue to pay tributes to the ETA members and the victims have to endure it.These 10 years that have elapsed since the end of ETA provide the necessary distance. And, furthermore, now, as Maixabel says, the story remains. Now the question is: how do we tell what happened? For example, I see in my house that younger people do not know what ETA is or what happened. It terrifies me to think that they want to forget those five decades of horror and that the new generations do not know anything about it. And then, this is a matter of coexistence. I come from abroad and I can theorize with it, but in the Basque Country people live with what happened, it is very present. Without going any further, they continue to pay tributes to the ETA members and the victims have to endure it.I see in my house that younger people do not know what ETA is or what happened. It terrifies me to think that they want to forget those five decades of horror and that the new generations do not know anything about it. And then, this is a matter of coexistence. I come from abroad and I can theorize with it, but in the Basque Country people live with what happened, it is very present. Without going any further, they continue to pay tributes to the ETA members and the victims have to endure it.I see in my house that younger people do not know what ETA is or what happened. It terrifies me to think that they want to forget those five decades of horror and that the new generations do not know anything about it. And then, this is a matter of coexistence. I come from abroad and I can theorize with it, but in the Basque Country people live with what happened, it is very present. Without going any further, they continue to pay tributes to the ETA members and the victims have to endure it.they continue to come out to pay tributes to the ETA members and the victims have to endure it.they continue to come out to pay tributes to the ETA members and the victims have to endure it.

The film takes sides. Just the fact of choosing this theme is already indicating a path towards coexistence and reconciliation. And those who refuse, where do they stay? The meetings are individual, voluntary and personal. Nobody represents anybody. They don't sit down to theorize or talk politics. Encounters are a matter between two people who speak to each other and who listen to each other. And another fundamental issue is that the delegitimizing speech of the violence of the repentant ETA members themselves is unbeatable. What they say about ETA is devastating. And I think this must be heard. The question would now be the greatest of all: is repentance possible? Does it make sense? The human exercise of repentance, of putting oneself in the victim's place, of taking responsibility for the damage caused and, also,to stop being a hero and become guilty of what you have done ... all that is worth it. And then there is the fact that Maixabel wants to give a second chance. None of this is open to criticism. Spanish cinema has historically been accused of forgetting about the victims when it has dealt with ETA ... There has always been a debt both in cinema and in literature.

The fish of bitterness

or

Homeland

have started the road.

Much has been said about the victims, but little was known about them.

That double victimization that Fernando Aramburu recounts and it is important to tell about it.

The victims were the ones who had to leave town.

And that is still there.

In the town of Maixabel, which is very small, there are two reliefs of two ETA members.

And that's where she passes every day.

It is now when they begin to put plates of the attacks.

There is no and recognition.

In other countries, the victims of the Holocaust have their place, their space, their memory ... Here it has cost us a lot.

Icíar Bollaín.JOSÉ AYMÁ

But Maixabel, like her husband Juan Mari Jáuregui, took sides for dialogue. In this sense they are an early exception ... Everything is an exception. Everything that surrounds Maixabel is very inspiring, but not representative. She and her husband were among the few who spoke about dialogue, in the same way that the so-called Vía de Nanclares barely welcomes just over 20 out of almost 800. And of that twenty, only 11 wanted to participate in the meetings. But that doesn't make it any less valuable. What role does forgiveness play in all this? I don't even think forgiveness is the bottom line. Neither they ask for it nor does she grant it. It is more the principle of repairing the victim, doing something that can heal the victim. Then there is a spirit of reintegration. A person who assumes what he has committed will be reintegrated earlier than one who does not.I want to believe that it is more an exercise in empathy than sitting down and listening and putting yourself in the victim's shoes. For ETA the victim did not even exist. It is not forgiveness, it is other things. Dialogue is not synonymous with forgiveness, but somehow it is implicit ... Yes, without a doubt. But forgiveness should be given by the murdered. Not even ETA members ask for forgiveness in encounters because they feel that this is making the victim himself more a victim. But if you sit down to talk, that already means something. Maixabel's gesture was criticized at the time by the victims. And now? Today [on Saturday] I have spoken with Amaia Guridi, widow of Santiago Oleaga, director of the Diario Vasco, another of the victims of these two men. He says that he would never go to talk to them because he does not want to know anything, but he liked the movie a lot, it seemed very real to him.I don't know how the rest of the victims' associations will take it now. It must be borne in mind that the first encounters are made with ETA killing. ETA has not killed for ten years and the scenario is different. The Vía Nanclares was also criticized, although it was a way for the government to fracture the monolithic discourse of the band. ETA is still in the political debate. The government is constantly criticized by the opposition for relying on Bildu according to what resolutions ... Bildu and the nationalist left still have a path of self-criticism to do that they have not done. On the other hand, we have spent years demanding that independence and any other claim be managed democratically and not by arms, and now that it is so: is it not valid either? There is a part of the population that feels represented by Bildu,To say that they are not valid as interlocutors makes no sense. I will say the cursed word: equidistance. No, the fundamental thing is the victims and working on the construction of coexistence. The past cannot be a throwing weapon. The work to be done has to be essentially constructive. There is still a lot to do to live together and in peace. How can a movie influence everything that is happening? After all, a film like this is also a political act. From Maixabel's point of view, which is the film's point of view, she has always been clear that it was necessary to work for coexistence even when killing herself. She has always spoken very clearly when no one dared to do so. She sees the movie as what she has always done, as what happened to her.So everything will remain the same? At the moment Maixabel is doing many interviews. The newspaper

Gara

has just interviewed her and she was the first to be an ETA victim in '

Gara

'. That is already an advance that the film has generated. The important thing is to generate debate ... I also think that the film has a cathartic point. There is still a lot of trauma. The cinema brings humanity to the stories and allows the viewer to be physically in the encounters. Cinema can change things.

I give you my eyes

, for example, they give it to the police, to the people who take care of the abused so that they become sensitized.

Cinema has that power, it gives the impression that there is a basic problem with memory and with history at all levels.

Do you think it is relevant to draw a line between the historical memory of the Civil War and the recent memory of terrorism? What unites the two is the lack of fair recognition of the victims.

Forget cannot be forgotten.

Not forgetting is partly repairing.

When you forget what happened, you forget the victims and thus do more harm to them.

What happens with historical memory is that there is a pain of non-recognition about some dead who are there and that you have to put some names and a surname, and bury properly.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

Know more

  • ETA

  • Bildu

  • Basque Country

  • Madrid

  • Parot doctrine

  • cinema

  • culture

  • HBPR

TerrorismInterior moves seven other ETA members, six of them will go to Basque prisons about to be managed by the PNV

Basque CountryThe harassment of the young people of the Basque PP: "There are at least two organized groups that come after us"

Spain Arrimadas, at the site of the attack on the Zaragoza barracks, cries out against "the laundering of the murderers and the oblivion of the victims"

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