Kimuak 2018: Basque short films
In collaboration with AECID Film Archive, CinemaAttic Edinburgh, Etxepare Basque Institute and the Hyde Park Picture House, the Kimuak program – aimed at promoting Basque short filmmaking – presents a meticulously selected collection of the best Basque shorts of 2018. The films vary from fiction works to documentaries and transport viewers to various places from Spanish Pyrenees to a desolate village in Lower Navarre, posing philosophical questions to human existence and losing touch with nature. The programme of shorts will be followed by a Q&A with the director of Above 592 Meters, Maddi Barber.
Kimuak (the Basque word for “sprout”) came into being two decades ago when they first pioneered the annual selection of short-films made in Basque Country, supporting the best films from the region. Following the example of France and New Zealand, the Basques became pioneer in championing short-films. The importance of an initiative like Kimuak goes beyond the mere work of selecting the best Basque short films of the year. It is like a school for film directors, a way-station towards feature films and a genre by itself, to which successful filmmakers often return.
The selection this year brings a particularly strong selection of short-films. Take a look for instance at Alcine Festival winners -one of the main European Short Film Festivals-, they awarded not 1 or 2…but 3! of the films coming from the Kimuak Selection this year. That alone says a lot about the quality and the great breed of Basque filmmakers you will find at this year’s Kimuak selection.
FULL PROGRAMME
Above 592 Meters (592 Metroz Goiti, dir. Maddi Barber): A documentary about the construction of Itoiz Dam on the slopes of the Spanish Pyrenees in the 1990s that flooded seven villages, displacing the residents 592 meters higher up, scarring the landscape and disturbing the relationship between people and their environment.
Mother (Ama, dir. Josu Martinez): Summer of 1915. In the Baigorri village of Lower Navarre, a woman lives waiting for a letter.
Still Fireflies (Ancora Lucciole, dir. Maria Elorza): In 1972, in one of his best-known articles, Pier Paolo Pasolini spoke of the disappearance of fireflies. A few months later he was murdered. Since then the fireflies have continued to disappear. But there are still people who remember them.
The Great Expedition (Espedizio Handia, dir. Iban del Campo): Human beings want to be more than they are, more than stardust.
Kafenio Kastello (dir. Miguel Ángel Jiménez): The centre of Athens. Surrounded by a world in crisis and generalised destruction, a small group of characters resist the end towards which they seem inevitably to be heading.
Do Not Wake Me Up (No Me Despertéis, dir. Sara Fantova): Bilbao, 2009. Jone is a teenager in the 4th year of secondary school. In her school there is a strong activist and abertzale (nationalist) atmosphere. When her father takes a political post in the Basque Government, she is faced with the need to have a bodyguard and give up the life they had been living until then.
Waiting (Zain, dir. Pello Gutiérrez): “Don’t ask me about the hidden reason of all dark things, or where the path of fickle time leads us.”
