Camera
Created by 24 fabulous filmmakers and two talented sound artists in conjunction with the 2018 edition of Punto De Vista International Documentary Film Festival in Pamplona, Spain.
On October 4th, 2007 Arantza, the director of the film, was detained and taken to prison. She remembers a few things about those days: endlessly walking around the prison exercise yard, swimming competitions, Rasha's prison journey... After 918 nights locked up, Arantza is set free. From then onwards, she recorded her memories and doubts, which are heard throughout the documentary as a kind of fragmented memoir.
Almost two decades ago, the Itoiz dam flooded seven villages and three natural reserves on the Pyrenean hillside in Navarra. The ecologist group Solidari@s con Itoiz registered the fight against its construction. Today, those who were there dream of the land lying beneath the water on video. Their voices and gestures come together to tell the tale of an individual and collective mourning still suffered today.
Entrails, a flock of sheep, one spring. The cooing of doves and songs hummed. Some vultures, bones, flowers and many hands. Hands which feed, milk, stroke, shear, film; hands that kill. Hands which inhabit the doubts and contradictions about using other species.
On the slopes of the Navarrese Pyrenees, the construction of the Itoiz dam in the 1990s flooded seven villages and three nature reserves. A strip of bare land, 592 metres above sea level, today marks a dividing line within the landscape of the valley. Below that level, the water; above it, life goes on.
Two men measure the heights of pine trees. A woman listens to what the trees are saying. The children of the village set up the camp. A cloud of digital dots reveals the forest. The pines have said that we can ask. They always called this place 'Paraíso'. Machines will come soon.
During the 1980s, a convent in Lizaso (Navarra) was home to the eccentric Arco Iris community. The building's nondescript walls were adorned with enormous floral motifs, and its rooms hosted large gatherings where people experimented with cathartic New Age practices. Today, the building is inhabited by cloistered monks, and traces of that episode are almost imperceptible. The authors of San Simón 62 visit the place, drawn by the testimonies of their mothers who, trying to shake off the aftermath of Franco's regime and face the personal and political challenges of this new era, passed through the Arco Iris community.
Touch acts as a catalyst to experiment with the possibilities of approaching a Renaissance painting. Using haptic visuality as an affective strategy, the limits between subject and object blur enabling a mutual contagion. The film combines theory and lived experience in a heterodox essay crossed by author's own subjectivity, the body, affect, folklore and feminism.
