From Memory to Horror: Eight New Gen Basque Filmmakers to Track

For a new generation of Basque filmmakers coming into focus at San Sebastián, stories often begin with something unresolved: an argument a child cannot remember, the working lives buried in an industrial landscape, a language whose influence reaches beyond the words spoken on screen.

“My films grow from spending time with people and places, allowing fiction to emerge from those encounters,” Ekain Albite tells Variety. His “Akira” is taking shape between the Basque Country and Georgia. Joana Moya’s upbringing on Bilbao’s industrial Left Bank informs her interest in “who we are beyond work and how the land and its materiality shape us.” For Gemma González Martínez, Basque identity provides a point of departure rather than a limit. “Being Basque gives me a very strong awareness of language, identity, memory and belonging,” she says. “But I don’t see it as a boundary. It is my starting point.”

Across their work, identity, memory and place are testing grounds. “I want cinema to provoke questions rather than provide answers,” says Asier Urbieta. Mikele Landa sees another possibility in that process: “I am tremendously interested in the use of memory as a matter to imagine possible futures, as a tool of resistance.”