After to the blacksmiththe expectations for the second feature film of Paul Urkijo they were tall. His first film was already a rara avis within the national cinematography, with that mixture of traditional tale, horror story, vindication of the Basque cultural tradition, all embellished with a careful staging, competent special effects and a black sense of humor. that gave a special packaging to the tape.
Irati continues to break the trick for a genre cinema and a look at the Basque cultural legacy that has not been exploited until now in our cinematography, either by despising genre cinema, by misunderstanding that a great Hollywood blockbuster is needed to deal with certain themes or by underestimating a legacy compared to Anglo-Saxon referents.
Con Irati, we have a story set in the eighth century, in a time of transition between the establishment of Christianity and the last throes of pagan elements. In this sense, Urkijo builds a work that dialogues with these two worlds that collide, although positioning himself, in a nostalgic way, in that fairy past, full of magical creatures and nature that represented a greater balance of the human being with the environment.
Almost as if it were a contemporary discourse, the rupture of the status quo protected by civilization not only supposes the forgetting of an entire cultural tradition, but also establishes a totally modern ecological message. Within the portrait, the tape tries to be as adjusted as possible to the time, be it in the art direction, with the costume work or the linguistic part. For the fantasy part to work, the historical part must also work. In this sense, a great effort can be seen in all this work to create a credible eighth century.
The construction of the fantastic that the filmmaker elaborates drinks from multiple references. The main one is the historical one, where Birch drink of those reports that came to him as a child, with characters and creatures that would foster his taste for fantasy.
Inspired by characters from the graphic novel The Cycle of Irati
There is a component close to the aesthetics of the comic also in the tape. Not only because the script adapts the work of Jon Muñoz Otaegui y Juan Luis Landa, but because the staging itself prioritizes a pictorial value of the shot also inherited from European comics. Added to this is a whole external baggage that the filmmaker also manages, ranging from the Arthurian legend (with Excalibur of John Boorman as a fundamental referent) until Tolkien and its audiovisual adaptations (more Bakshi y Jackson than Amazon).
With these ingredients, Irati it is presented as an old-fashioned heroic fantasy adventure film. Its success is not in the portrait, but in the way it reaches the public. And it is that, for everything else to work, the main requirement that this film must meet is to be a work of entertainment with which the viewer enjoys a great show. We can say that the film offers, sequence after sequence, the sensation of being before a work that dares to offer a story and an unexpected narrative for Spanish cinema. It does not always reach its goal, because, despite everything, it is a production with limitations; however, even in its most irregular stretches, the film makes up for its shortcomings with ambition.
The tape can be blamed for having an irregular rhythm or some interpretations that, when recited in Basque, are artificial and theatrical. In his sense of the epic, we find that he ends up taking himself too seriously where a note of humor could have better tuned the result. And with regard to the special effects, neither the budget nor the Weta devices are available.
Still, for a second feature film, Irati it can boast of being an icebreaker ship in the tundra of Spanish cinema, opening routes that will facilitate future expeditions.
* Irati won the Audience Award for Best Feature Film at the Canary Islands Fantastic Film Festival Ciudad de La Laguna Isla Calavera 2022.
