filmmaking

Beyond nation and identity: some notes on contemporary Basque cinema

In 1968, the documentary Ama Lur [Mother Earth] by Fernando Larruquert and Nestor Basterretxea marked the emergence of a new symbolic force in the Basque film industry, sparking hope amidst the seemingly insurmountable constraints posed by Franco’s dictatorship in the Basque Country. For this small corner of the earth, facing the Bay of Biscay and surrounded by the Pyrenees, the documentary’s unique language, shifting from the poetic to the anthropological, evoked the Basque country’s deep cultural roots long consigned to oblivion by the harsh years of dictatorship.

If You Would Understand What I’m Saying You Would Be  Human Trans

Knowing the experience of someone else is something that art can facilitate. Recalling what Alice said to her cat in the beginning of the film, if you would understand what I’m saying you would be human— maybe this film will even make someone who’s not a trans woman from South Korea understand a tiny bit of what it is to be a trans woman in South Korea, or maybe it will just show a glimpse of the lives of two specific, beautiful, hurting, loving, flawed, and infinitely important women.

Cinematic time and the accumulation of ecosocial crises

As such, the “technological promise to capture time” opened the cinema to confront all sorts of social and natural limits, from “the denial of the radical finitude of the human body” to the “access to other temporalities.” In collusion with capitalism’s ideological fetish for progress and infinite growth, the emergence of cinema was accompanied with stories and fables that would introduce and legitimize “the recognizable tropes of orientalism, racism, and imperialism essential to the nineteenth-century colonialist imperative to conquer other times, other spaces.”

The in-betweenness of documentary spaces

I consider documentary fieldwork and filming as a space and time in between. By in between, I mean the combination of certain characteristics that make the space and time of documentary fieldwork both part of everyday life and at the same time removed from it. Before a documentary film becomes representation (something about the world) it is an event (something that happens in the world) In other words, before a documentary film becomes a product that can travel around the screens, it is a creative and social process rooted in the place and time where it happens. Documentary filming is a lived time as well as an imagined, speculative and desired one.