Orbainak (The Scars)

"Orbainak" explores the idea of wound in the collective Basque unconscious through the history of a family of farmers. This family condenses several aspects of the contemporary Basque political history, from the context of the War of 1936 and the post-war situation and Franco's dictatorship through the formation of a more or less incipient ETA and thus to the present time where the very idea of the Basque is in crisis. It is at the core of this crisis where "Orbainak" has its anchor and where the wound lies under its scars, which are a mark on the crust of time. For that reason, the elements that the film employs are at the same time document and something else: allegory.

In this way, "Orbainak" works with different image registers and the choice of aspect ratio serves as a methodology to force the original archive images -still photographs- to be reframed. This process, that we could call an archaeological method of the image, allows us to activate aspects of the image that were hidden until now and which condense the features of what we have been calling: the scars. From the perspective of film-essay, the images and sounds in the film are related to the problematic of memory in a critical and active way.