17/10/2022 - Basque director Paul Urkijo makes a medieval fantasy adventure film as daring as it is moving

There are films that are able to fascinate you, to transport you to other places, to create unique worlds. It is not a question of whether the film is good (or not), but of feeling a certain admiration for it, of being moved by it, of it staying with you for a long time after the fact. This is what happened to me with Irati [+see also:
trailer
film profile], the new film by Paul Urkijo, winner of the Grand Audience Award for Best Film and the award for Best Special Effects in the Official Section of the 55th Sitges Film Festival.

Urkijo's film is a sort of Basque Lord of the Rings, but with a lot less money, which is already a great credit to its level of production. Through the fantastic, Irati goes back to the 8th century to tell the story of Eneko (Eneko Sagardoy), a young nobleman and Christian from the Pyrenees who must fulfil the promise he made to his late father: to protect and lead his people into the new era. To do so, he must recover his father’s body, buried in a pagan manner next to Charlemagne's treasure. However, despite his Christian faith, he will need the help of Irati (Edurne Azkarate), an enigmatic pagan from the area whom he met in his childhood. On this mission, the two young men will venture into a strange forest where "everything that has a name exists".

There are several fascinating things about Irati. First, its boldness and how it handles this risk. Urkijo chooses a difficult and barely trodden path in Spain (to make a blockbuster with little resources to fit) and achieves an incredible result. The director's aesthetic approach is breath-taking, using extraordinary visual materials, he manages to bring expressionism to the forest. In this sense, the cinematography with natural light and real fire in the dark is one of the most stunning aspects of the film. Everything that accompanies the production also manages to live up to it: the artwork, the costumes, the sound, the music, the choice of spaces and their framing, all contribute to creating this unique magical world. This personality and clarity from the filmmaker can also be seen in the script, in the textual materials he uses to tell the story.

Irati is a very regional story, drawing on the stories of Basque mythology from the director's childhood memories to create a new space of sentimental memory. In doing so, he achieves one of the great virtues of fiction: starting from his own, he reaches the universal. Through it, as in classical literature (also present in the film), Irati speaks poetically about timeless human issues. The weight of roots, the idea of loyalty and honour, the meaning of identity, the struggle for a place and the value of that struggle, the meaning of faith, the classic concept of "the beautiful death" (filling one's life with deeds to achieve eternal glory, to be remembered and loved in eternity), the fear of forgetting, the presence of death in life, the search for your origins and the price of that search. Urkijo manages to create the ideal framework, intrinsically fictional, to narrate all these themes with epic beauty.

Through fantasy, Irati manages to be an adventure film (also a love story) as daring as it is moving. A film that achieves a very personal magic, and in doing so, also manages to touch on the beauty of the strange.

Irati is a production from the companies Bainet Zinema, Ikusgarri Films, Kilima Media and ETB, which will be distributed in Spain by Filmax on 24th February 2023.

(Translated from Spanish by Vicky York)