Still of Unax Ugalde in the film 'Baztán' by Iñaki Elizalde.
In the fall of 2011, a film crew travels to the remote valley of Baztan to make a film about dark events that occurred in the early XNUMXth century. While filming and sharing moments with the neighbors - some of them participate as actors in the film - they discover a racial discrimination that is still present in the life of the valley after more than ten centuries. This is a story of people and characters like Joxe (Unax Ugalde), a young man who rebels against this discrimination against him and his ancestors for being exhausted.
With this argument, 'Baztan', Iñaki Elizalde's first feature film, opens today. presented in San Sebastián, which recovers the history of the agotes, a community in the Navarran valley of Baztan that lived under discrimination for a long time, moving between the metacinem and the documentary. This duality represents more drawbacks than benefits in the final result, since the fiction part is exciting and very well done, but the meta-movie part seems more like a 'making off' and tarnishes the product.
So we think that an idea that could have turned out very well has been impoverished by the director's insistence on showing us how the movie is made. In our opinion a waste of actors, where do we find Carmelo Gómez, and good technical resources, because of the way of telling it.
More information - Spanish films from the 60th edition of the San Sebastian Festival
Source - labutaca.net