NEGU HURBILAK

The telling of this tale through a fictional short story in which being able to recreate this experience helps the viewer to live it the same way as our protagonist. Feeling the fears, desires, wishes, frustrations… The fiction permits that magnetic approach that will set the viewers in the soul and skin of the main character and really experience the other side of this conflict first-hand.

Nevertheless, the dramatic situation the “iheslari” live is also the way to approach the people she comes across during her journey. People of a small border town who have always lived intertwined by the “muga” (border). A place of no delimitation, but of constant flow, of change, of suspense, of liminality… A community shrouded by silence that says it all, of looks that explain everything, of secrets that everyone keeps. To explore the dimensions of all the rest of the people who also have been part of this conflict like any other “Iheslari”, is one of our main goals in this short story. Telling not only for these other people what the conflict meant in material ways... They were also not only direct witnesses, but also how they were involved and emotionally affected.

Synopsis:

Negu Hurbilak narrates a story about an escape. An escape in which the main character, a young girl of 25 urged by persecution and wrapped in uncertainty, does not know where she is, where she is heading to or if she will ever arrive. She has one clear goal: cross the “muga” (border), knowing that will take her far away from where she came where she isn’t safe anymore. Nevertheless, once she arrives in the last town on the border in the mountains, which seems stopped in time, her escape, marked by the pain of abandonment and vulnerability of its becoming, starts to be more and more dense and llabyrinthine. Slowly she’ll be getting lost in the corners of that space and the difficulty of leaving this place will be more of a struggle to leave behind.

Data sheet:

Title: Negu Hurbilak
Fiction film
Language: Euskera
Format: 16mm/color
Aspect ratio: 1.66:1

Objectives:

We want to depict the experience of loss and pain of one of the most unknown areas of this long conflict, whose most dramatic consequences still hang in the air from its ruins: the millions of people that had to flee from political persecution.

We want to investigate in this dimension this still unhealed wound through the experience of this young woman that with uncertainty and vulnerability of the future, her identity is fading away in a suspended time at a border space that welcomes her.

We want to recreate the evolution wrapped by telluric density of a community that has seen the centuries pass resting in a hidden valley and surrounded by the river, the mountains and the immense nature that keeps silent, in the brightness of their glances, in the bustle of its carnivals, in the solidary gestures. The community in that environment is another character in our story.

We want to create a narrative that reflects the density of silence in its images, the unperceivable gestures in their glances; the emotional, esthetic, and sensitive register in the furrows of their wrinkled faces that crosses an experience like that of escape, and to which worlds can hardly be put into.

We want to show the vital and human authentic present in all dimensions, in all the actors without exceptions, and that were hidden under the stereotyped stigma of a conflict that is as dramatic as the one we are experiencing.

We want to show that an authentic reconciliation must be open to recognition of all experiences that have passed through all sectors and people and allow us a collective account of all democratic coexistence.

Negu Hurbilak has the support and financial backing of ESCAC FILMS, the production company of the school where the team has studied. Even so, since it is a short film shot in the Basque Country and entirely shot in 16mm, its costs exceed what the school provides us. Our goal with this campaign is to obtain the necessary funds to be able to carry out this project on which we have been working for a long time and feel such necessity to carry out. The funds will mainly be destined to the transportation, accommodation, and subsistence allowances of the crew in the village where the movie takes place and with a duration of 10 days of filming. We are aware that moving mostly a Catalan team to the Basque Country is a great cost, but we believe that the only way to tell this story is shooting it at that exact location where it took place. We will allocate part of the funds also to camera, light and sound material; scenery and rental of the locations themselves; filming insurance; crowdfunding rewards; and a recognition for the artistic team.

At the moment we are in the development phase of the project, with script rewrites, working with the artistic team and defining the locations and aesthetics of the short film. During mid-November we will start with the preproduction in order to have all the filming logistics ready by the end of December the filming itself will take place from January 10th to January 20th, 2022, then from there the post production process with begin (editing, sound mixing and color grading). Our objective is to be able to release the short film in mid-June 2022.

Pain. It is perhaps the word that pierces an “iheslari” as they flee. They can’t look back; they have no time to think. There’s no time to feel, the “Iheslari” must flee. It isn’t possible to be an “Iheslari” forever, or maybe it’s impossible to stop being one. Once you leave your house, your home, once you start the journey of escaping, answers disappear, and certainties leave you. Although there is something that scares an “Iheslari” more than leaving their home and their loved ones or having the feeling that there is a possibility of never seeing their family and places they grew up in ever again. And that feeling is uncertainty. Because an “iheslari” doesn’t know where they are nor where they’re going, or who they're going to be, not even where they'll begin to become someone. Their whole identity, life, past and future are put on hold. Frozen. Waiting. That someone or something at some uncertain moment will make that limbo stop. Of their uncertainty. Waiting. For someone to pick them up and take them away Towards a new life. What life?

That moment of fragility, of bewilderment, of loss and identity limbo is what we want to explore with our film. Search in those thousands of people who were forced to flee and seek refuge or who are in exile, and those who have tried and failed. Delve into their feelings, their uncertainties, their pain. We do not want to explore the conflict of violence. Physical violence is not everything in a conflict as persistent as that between the Basque Country and the Spanish and French states.

We want to enter the hearts of these people. Because deep down, when for whatever reason the apparent secure networks that sustain our existence fail, they find themselves in a universal feeling, that of uprooting, of leaving home and not knowing if you will ever return to it. The one to wonder “Who am I?” “What will be left of me?” A deep tear, an identity mutilation of such magnitude and such strength, that it leaves you frozen. Or so says J. Sarrionandia, a writer who, in exile in Cuba, visited a friend of his who was also in exile and who, after years of escaping, one day froze. Perhaps because he remembered, he says, everything that could have been (Sarrionandia, J. 2001. Lagun izoztua. Donostia: Elkar). And we want to do it from the experience of a woman, in order to try to go beyond the androcentric stereotype that characterized this conflict.

That contradiction and vulnerability so strong and so deep of the "Iheslari" is what traps us. Leave your land for having loved it, for having "defended" it. How would one feel about that? What answer could there be? Is it worth the fight? Is there another way? Is there another possibility? What do they think of guilt? Is there guilt?

Thousands of questions address us. The project aims to find the answers among some of those thousands of people who have experienced this upheaval. To tell the story from a place that has not been told, that has always been ignored. The conflict from the feeling perspective, a more internal and subjective way. Listen to testimonies and then build a story that encompasses that pain, that hopelessness. There is a great wound in our Basque society, deep and multifaceted, and one of its fundamental dimensions is that of storytelling. We don't want to tell shallow and stereotypical stories based on best sellers. We want to live it in its complexity, from within, suffer it with the people who have really lived it. *Give a window, a voice to those people who until now have not been able to narrate the pain of their experience and who, therefore, have not been heard.** Whose heartbreaking experience has hardly been told. But above all, we want to find ourselves in those roots of the Basque conflict. Trying to understand what it is that has moved people, society, throughout this war. Diving into the great sea of deep contradictions that this has generated for us and will continue to generate. We do not know if we will find an answer or a certainty, but an uncontrollable impulse within us forces us to begin this journey.

Who is the project aimed at?

After more than 50 years of conflict, the trace of the wounds that it has left in our society are more than evident. We feel that there is a social need when it comes to talking about a fracture as large and deep as it is complex. The weight of the story is increasing in importance in a conflict where cinematographically, it seems that only one of the edges of everything that that meant for us is talked about. Explaining each dimension of wounds is our duty as a society. Giving a voice to those stories and subjects that, if not represented, will be forgotten in the history drawer, is a more urgent need than ever. There were thousands. With that, this story of a young woman on the run. We live intertwined by these stories of pain, and we have all, directly or indirectly, been part of this conflict to which we have not been able to remain indifferent. And, therefore, we all have something to express. The conflict has not ended but, now that it has been redirected and its most painful dimension has ended, perhaps we can begin to heal that immense wound gradually. But, for this, beyond the winners and losers, all those voices, all those stories, all those experiences that are still silenced must be heard without exception. How to restore, reconcile and respect in order to come to recognize each other without exceptions? This question is what sustains our gaze.

For this reason, we think that the potential audience is the whole of the Basque society. She is the one who has directly experienced this problem and is the one who is looking for answers about becoming open at this time. Being such a profound issue, we are aware that our main co-financiers will not only be people who may have experienced similar situations among family members and friends, but also all those people who can empathize with this gaze or who can project their concerns on it. For this reason, our potential audience will be close but, at the same time, it will easily spread among the rest of society as the social network expands the project. We have a close audience that is very committed and that knows people with similar concerns and views to those of the project. This will allow us to do a lot of expansion work so that it spreads throughout the territory quickly.

Today we find many areas and sectors that can support this project, since they seek to shed light on points of view that perhaps the large film platforms would never support. For this reason, we will seek support from publishers, research and dissemination groups and institutions that seek to support creative initiatives that aim to treat the story in all its complexity and richness.

Four years ago, a group of students from the Escuela Superior de Cine y Audiovisuales de Catalunya (ESCAC) from different backgrounds met for the first time. As we studied and developed our projects for the school, we were building, in parallel, a group of people who shared similar concerns and points of view when it came to tackling these creations.

Our first project, Erroitz, laid the first step for a path of creation and complicity that is still under construction today. In this first project we worked together for the first time in the Basque Country and we began to lay the foundations of what we are today. A year later, we started production of the second project shot also in the Basque Country called Uhara. In between, we worked on some creations that revolved around the Catalan reality, as was the case with A rabassa morta. With more complicity, experience, and resources, we enlarged the group and began to add new members from the field of cinema and also from beyond the academic environment. These new members continued to add desire and passion to continue building and generating projects that speak of the complexity of existence and the authenticity of life.

We are currently in the phase of starting our most ambitious project to date. This one that we present to you: Negu Hurbilak. Thanks to the numerous visits to the town where we will shoot the film, the fusion between the technical team and its inhabitants has been very enriching. There have been so many hours that we have shared with the people from this town that they have ended up being part of the creative process. That is why the team is very proud to have been able to achieve a real symbiosis with them. For all this, we can say that today the group is stronger, and we have more desire than ever to continue working and developing Negu Hurbilak.

Technical and artistic team:

Direction: Ekain Albite
Script: Ekain Albite, Adrià Roca and Nicolau Mallofré
Casting: Mikel Ibarguren
Production: Guillermo Ortuño and Roos van den Heuvel
Camera: Javier Seva and Víctor Rodríguez
Art direction: Justina Montserrat
Sound: Iosu Martínez
Editing: Edu V. Romero and Sara Salinas
Graphic design and still photography: Ângela Ramos
Cast: Jone Laspiur, Beñardo Mutuberria and Anita Hualde.