2023-09-12 19:55:58
The director of the San Sebastián Film Festival, José Luis Rebordinos, insisted this Tuesday that the documentary ‘Don’t call me Vealin which the journalist Jordi Évole interview with the former leader of ETA Jose Antonio Urrutikoetxea, Josu Ternera, It will be projected because it “does not whitewash” terrorism and because “speaking out is not agreeing.”
Rebordinos has responded, with an official statement, to the open letter signed by 514 people, some of them from journalism, literature and universities, which requests that the Netflix documentary be excluded from the festival’s programming, understanding that it serves to ” whitewash ETA”.
The letter was made public yesterday, but it has not reached the Festival, despite the fact that its director has responded to the arguments presented and has offered a prior private screening to a group of people representing the 514 signatories.
“We do not share your opinion that the film should be removed from the programming of this next edition of the Festival due to the fact that it has Josu Urrutikoetxea as its protagonist and that he has had very high responsibilities in the trajectory of the terrorist group ETA” , says Rebordinos
“Neither justifies nor whitewashes ETA”
The director of the festival assures that the documentary “neither justifies nor whitewashes ETA” and argues that the San Sebastian contest “would not screen a film with those premises.”
Rebordinos maintains that the festival would not program a film that justified Augusto Pinochet’s coup d’état in Chile, which has been 50 years old, but remembers that, however, ““Yes, a documentary was programmed in San Sebastián that interviewed some of its main coup plotters.”
This is “Pinochet and his three generals” (José María Berzosa, 2004), a film that demonstrated, as Rebordinos has indicated, that “speaking out is far from being right.”
He also argues that he cine It is “source of history”, Therefore, he has often brought to the screen “protagonists, perpetrators of episodes of unjustifiable violence but about which he has had the will to investigate.”
He cites the cases of ‘Shoah’ (Claude Lanzmann, 1988), ‘S21: The Red Killing Machine’ (Rithy Panh, 2003) and ‘The Act of Killing’ (Joshua Oppenheimer, Christine Cynn, 2012).
“We reflected on all this in a book and a cycle in 2016 under the title ‘The Act of Killing. Cinema and global violence’: 32 films were programmed there that were often a weapon of denunciation, a means for analysis or a form of direct intervention in many tragic problems“, recalled the director of the Festival.
“In short, we believe that the film ‘No me llama Ternera’ has to be seen first and subjected to criticism later and not the other way around,” which is why the Festival offers a representation of the signatories the opportunity to see the film in a private preview screening.
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