Eneko Sagardoy leads the cast of ‘Irati’.
The latest feature film by the director from Alava, nominated for five Goyas and which opens on February 24, will be screened at the Zugaza cinema in Durango
It has not yet been released in theaters but it already boasts of having received five Goya Award nominations. The latest film by director Paul Urkijo, ‘Irati’, is unstoppable after its presentation last October at the Sitges Festival, where it won the Audience Award and the Best Special Effects Award. Citizens will have to wait until February to be able to enjoy this film that combines history with fantasy and mythology. However, those who come to Durango this Saturday will have the privilege of seeing it exclusively in the space available to Azoka for audiovisual projections called Irudienea. «We were very clear that we wanted to be present at the Azoka de Durango. It is a key date for Basque culture, and as it is a film shot in Basque, we considered it very important to attend,” Urkijo says.
The doors of the Zugaza cinema, located a few meters from the nerve center of the fair, Landako Gunea, will open its doors at 12:30 p.m. to receive the public and the cast that has participated in the feature film. Once the session is over, the protagonists of the film will offer a colloquium. “We want to share the film with the public and be able to show the work we have done, since the wait until February is long,” urges the director. To attend, it will be necessary to come with an invitation that can be picked up in advance, starting at 10:30 a.m., at the Durangués cinema box office.
Video.
‘Irati’ trailer.
Urkijo proposes in ‘Irati’ a trip to the past in which fantasy and the historical are mixed. The feature film has been filmed mostly in Basque, but it also has some Latin and Arabic. Languages that have been adapted to resemble those spoken in the eighth century in which the film is set.
After the success achieved in Sitges, the Catalan Fantastic Film Festival, ‘Irati’ has obtained five nominations for the Goya Awards. The film will compete in the categories of Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Costume Design, Best Special Effects, Best Original Score and Best Original Song. The filmmaker couldn’t be happier. “The nominations have been a complete surprise, but I think the departments that have gotten them absolutely deserve it because they have done an amazing job. There have also been other departments that I think would have deserved to be nominated, after all it is a great film. But we are very happy to be able to be there and defend the film in its entirety », he comments.
basque mythology
The cast is headed by the Goya award winner Eneko Sagardoy (whom he already had for his first work, ‘Errementari’), Edurne Azkarate, Iñigo Aranbarri, Itziar Ituño, Nagore Aramburu, Elena Uriz, Iñaki Beraetxe, Ramon Agirre and Kepa Erasti, among others. In the words of its director Paul Urkijo: «Irati is the fantastic medieval adventure film that I have always wanted to tell. I have been fascinated by Basque mythology since I was a child and my parents used to tell me stories about the Basajaun who lived in the mountains, the lamias who lived in the river or Mari, who lived in the cave. ‘Irati’ is an epic tribute to that dark and fascinating world of mythological characters”.
One of the bloody battles of ‘Irati’.
The film is set in the time when Christianity spreads across Europe while pagan beliefs disappear. Faced with the attack of Charlemagne’s army crossing the Pyrenees, the leader of the valley asks the ancestral gods for help. Through a blood pact, he defeats the enemy by giving his life in exchange, but first, he makes his son Eneko promise to protect and lead his people in the new era. Years later, Eneko faces that promise with a mission: to recover the body of his father buried in a pagan way next to Charlemagne’s treasure.
Despite his Christian faith, he will need the help of Irati, an enigmatic pagan from the area. The two young people will enter a strange and inhospitable forest where “everything that has a name exists.” «’Irati’ delves into the anthropological aspect of mythology itself. Because in the end, mythology is a way of seeing all these natural environments to which they are, in some way, deeply rooted. And it is in this environment that our ancestors lived”, adds Urkijo.