'Irati': cyclops, games of thrones and women of fire who fornicate in the Basque forests

The excellent moment of Spanish cinema must be measured primarily by quality, but there is still another variant to celebrate the festival: the diversity of genres and styles.

That Albert Serra and Rodrigo Sorogoyen, Carla Simón and Carlota Pereda, Jonás Trueba and Alauda Ruiz de Azúa, Lois Patiño and Roberto Bueso, Alberto Mielgo and Alberto Vázquez, who resemble each other like an egg and a chestnut, coexist is formidable.

And these names and a few more were joined in 2022 by Paul Urkijo from Vitoria, who makes almost unprecedented cinema in Spain.

With his second film, the unique

a medieval epic with touches of mythological sword and sorcery fantasy, nominated for five Goya awards, he confirms his rare

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Spanish terror knows no limits

Unusual referents in Spanish cinema seem to lead to Irati: Tolkien and

The

role-playing games, video games, fantastic American cinema, adventure and a slight romantic touch from the eighties;

comics, popular tales, medieval history and even walks through the woods accompanied by oral stories about the strange creatures that inhabit them, according to tradition.

Basque mythology, sentimental memory, superstitions and cinematographic action come together in

a hymn to freedom and the defense of the stranger, as well as a reflection on the power and cornering of women, set in the year 778 in the Pyrenees. Western.

The mysteries of the terroir have always been in Spanish cinema, from Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón to Julio Medem, passing through José Luis Borau, but that heart of the forest had never appeared in our films with the medieval magic of Urkijo.

Perhaps specialists of a certain age remember the presence at the 1993 San Sebastián festival of the too-forgotten

a medieval (and suicidal) bet by Paco Lucio, co-produced by Elías Querejeta and co-written by Lucio, Gutiérrez Aragón and the Querejeta himself.

But since then, little or nothing can be related to the work of Urkijo, who in

(2017) has already shown where his genre film style was headed, inspired by legend and history (there, the Carlist wars), which can boast a stupendous pulse for battle and action sequences, shot in locations natural and not on set, something as meritorious as it is unusual.

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Loosely based on the graphic novel

published by Juan Luis Landa and Jon Muñoz Otaegui in 2004, the film is set in caves, castles, and forests, with the wars against the Franks looming, Charlemagne's treasure, and paper of the papacy and of religion in a preponderant place.

The lords of the valley, the incipient kingdom of Pamplona, ​​witches, paganism, the “new Christian faith”, a cyclops and lamias, creatures with bird feet, swarm around there.

Perhaps the guiding thread of the story becomes a bit scattered in the central nucleus, but the visualization of the magic (the rain of stones, the appearance of the giant with one eye...), the quality of the special effects (oh, that Goya for

that polish a story to dream, and the beautiful epilogue leave the film very high.

"Women of fire who fornicate with snakes to cause storms."

Here is an unimaginable phrase in Spanish cinema until the arrival of Urkijo, who did not even need to invent a language, like the authors of

or

so that his epic fantasy has a nuance atavistic in language: Basque was already there.

Irati

Directed by:

Paul Urkijo.

Performers:

Eneko Sagardoy, Edurne Azkarate, Itziar Ituño, Nagore Aranburu. 

Genre:

Fantasy.

Spain, 2022.

Duration:

114 minutes.

Premiere: February 24.

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