Aro berria

A commune in the Basque Country is the setting for Irati Gorostidi Agirretxe’s intricate ensemble drama, as its residents split from the Spanish mainstream after Franco’s death to explore new approaches to life and labor. Special Jury Mention, San Sebastián Film Festival.

Aro Berria—Basque for “new age”—resurrects a largely overwritten episode in the story of Spain’s transition to democracy, observing with sensitivity as idealists test the limits of the moment’s radical possibilities. This heady and intricate ensemble drama begins in San Sebastián in 1978, where the union representing the metalworkers at the water-meter factory has just negotiated a contract that leaves its most extreme members disillusioned. Several leftists decamp to one of the alternative communities then springing up in rural areas, in Spain as elsewhere, and take up new spiritual and sexual practices (Sirāt director Oliver Laxe memorably pops up as a Tantric guru), hoping to follow their egalitarian principles all the way to a total reinvention of private property and the family. Basque writer-director Irati Gorostidi Agirretxe, whose own parents lived in an alternative community before her birth, mixes nimble intellectual discourse with a loving tactility in her debut feature, lingering over the process of screen-printing leaflets and baking bread as she recreates an inflection point in the history of the counterculture. Special Jury Mention, San Sebastián Film Festival.