About Medem's Documentary

Here you have an article published at The Guardian about Julio Medem's documentary "Basque Ball : The Skin Against the Wall" by Giles Tremlett, a "journalist" in the pay roll of Jose Maria Aznar:

Anyone for pelota?

Julio Medem's new film tells both sides of the bloody history of Spain's Basque country. So why is he being compared to Hitler's film-maker, asks Giles Tremlett

Giles Tremlett
The Guardian,
Thursday October 23 200

When Spanish film director Julio Medem read through his penultimate screenplay, Aitz, he was so shocked by his own writing that he threw it into the wastepaper basket. News that the director of such quirky classics of contemporary Spanish cinema as Cows and Lovers of the Arctic Circle had binned one of his scripts may alarm his devotees. But Medem insists that he jettisoned Aitz not because it was pure bilge, but because it was pure bile.

"I had got to the point where I had even made hatred a noble thing, where I thought it was beautiful to hate. It was obscene, so I threw it away," he says.

Medem's main problem was that he was Basque. Aitz had somehow got caught up in the violence that has tortured and sapped the energies of his countrymen for the past 30 years. Torn apart by the violence of Eta, battered by the opposing forces of Basque and Spanish nationalism, the Basques show no sign of finding a way out of their orgy of hatred and recrimination.

Medem had tried to escape, moving from his home city of San Sebastián to Madrid seven years ago. He had wanted to leave behind the suffocating political atmosphere imposed by those promoting the more exclusive ideals of Basque nationalism. He soon found, however, that there was no respite. For in Madrid the pendulum swung the other way. There he discovered that Basque nationalism of any kind, violent or non-violent, was fast becoming a new demon. In the capital, he says, some were beginning to forget the distinction between the Basques who used bullets to back their argument and those who used words.

And so Medem, who had already cast a sceptical eye on Basque obstinacy and the weight of tradition in his first film, Cows, made the surprising, many would say courageous, decision to turn his film- making skills to politics. The product of that move, a documentary, La Pelota Vasca: la Piel Contra la Piedra (Basque Ball: the Skin Against the Stone), is the most controversial thing to hit Spanish cinemas for years.

The sport of pelota vasca is fast, furious and athletic. Players with large curved baskets strapped to their hands hurl a small, hard ball against two walls set at right-angles. It is also, according to Medem, a form of dialogue between antagonists: the ball a point of union between two sides that are, formally, fighting one another. For the director of The Red Squirrel, Earth, and Sex and Lucia, that also made it a perfect metaphor for what is missing in the Basque country.

Designed to help fill that void and to "see hatred without hating it", Medem's Basque Ball has been condemned by the country's culture minister, Pilar del Castillo, boycotted by some intellectuals and criticised as ingenuous by the others. That is quite something for a film whose apparently modest ambition was to allow some 100 people of all political creeds to talk about 30 years of bloodshed and the growing confrontation between the conservative centralist government of prime minister José María Aznar and the non-violent Basque nationalists who run the Basque regional government.

In fact, the film was pilloried even before it opened, with two anti-Eta campaigners who had agreed to take part insisting they be removed (Medem refused) and Del Castillo declaring that Medem had placed Eta and the Spanish government on equal footing. Medem was compared to Hitler's film-maker, Leni Riefenstahl, and one politician called on him to return money state television had paid to show one of his earlier films.

Medem admits that the days before the film's showing at the San Sebastián film festival last month were pure anxiety. "I had not expected to get such a lynching. They were even saying that this film would lead people to terrorism," he says. In the end, his fellow Basques gave Medem a standing ovation, while he and Daniel Múgica, son of a local politician murdered by Eta, fell into an emotional embrace. "It was the biggest and most moving ovation of my life," he says. The film has since played well across the rest of Spain, finding a place in the top 10.

So what does a documentary made by such an idiosyncratic film-maker look like? Some of Medem's favourite visual tricks are here. His interviewees are placed in landscapes, rural and industrial, that sum up the mythical Basque country already seen in Cows - a place of rugged, sometimes brutal, beauty. Snatches of the cowardly axeman hero of Cows, of Basque stone-lifters and the rural sportsmen who are local heroes, are juxtaposed with news footage of violence and death. A naive and romantic Orson Welles appears, describing the Basque people in black and white film (and black and white terms) as neither Spanish nor French. The camera moves through the brooding Basque mountains, a vast depository of myths and of the national identity that many of those filmed seek to create or defend.

Medem, alone, edited more than 100 hours of film down to 115 minutes. His skill with the edit machine helps maintain the dramatic rhythm - as do the tragic first-hand accounts of suffering from those who have experienced the terror. It also leaves a clear, subjective and, for many, controversial message: that only a referendum among Basques could solve the region's problems. Most Spaniards would disagree.

Though Eta refused to be filmed - as did Aznar's People's party - it is difficult to explain the degree to which Medem has crossed the frontier of Spanish political acceptability. The film shows Arnaldo Otegi, leader of the now banned Batasuna party that operated as a front for Eta. For many Spaniards, Otegi is a demon incarnate, a purveyor of violence and cruelty - inexplicably supported by some 10% of Basques. Here, too, is the wife of an Eta man singing the praises of a good father and husband as she visits him in jail.

There is a pain-faced young woman relating a story of torture, beatings, naked humiliation and threats of rape at the hands of the Spanish police. Medem clearly believes her tale; given the desolate way she tells it, it is very hard not to. Viewers have to decide who is lying: the woman or a confident court doctor who denies that torture happens during the five days in which terror suspects can be held by Spanish police. Who is right? It is a question most Spanish newspapers do not air and local cinema critics left out of their reviews.

The intervention of the Eta man's wife has provoked particular rage among the film's critics. The fact that Medem chose to mix her story with that of the wife of an Eta victim has been criticised as giving equal treatment to killers and victims. But this assumes that viewers cannot think for themselves. The Eta wife's protestations that her husband is "the apple of his mother's eye" - and that, therefore, there must be some reason for his violence - serves only to make her, and her husband's cause, sound even more redundant. "This woman cannot bear the idea that her husband is a killer. She is trying to justify the unjustifiable," says Medem.

In a place where hate is such an easy emotion, the wife of the Eta victim, whose main worry is that her son "should not grow up to think he has the right to kill his father's murderers" seems, by contrast, almost angelic.

So, too, does Eduardo Madina, a young, atypical Basque socialist whose reaction to having a leg blown off by an Eta bomb is to remain faithful, despite the provocation, to the beliefs he held before that moment. Invited by his attackers to hate, Madina turned them down. He also did not like Medem's final cut, finding it too pro-Basque nationalist.

Basque Ball has, Medem says, been a form of preparation for his next film, Aitor. "I told myself that first I would do something about politics and then I would feel free to make fiction. I like this story a lot. I have a huge desire to get back to fiction, which is my real place," he says.

The hero of Aitor is, he says, the scion of a great line of pelota players who is forced, during 30 years of Basque violence, to confront a series of tests inviting him to hate. Like Madina, Aitor will refuse the invitation. Helped by the voices of his own secret opera, he will turn instead to love.

For those used to wading through the misery, fear, terror and hatreds of Basque politics, it is a refreshing, if sadly unrealistic, idea. Medem gives his documentary a poetic ending in the mouth of the Basque language's best-known writer, Bernardo Atxaga. The Basque country should be like a city, says Atxaga, embracing all, ending violence and thereby producing a form of communal levitation.

It would be a perfect ending, if only poetry really could stop violence.

· Basque Ball: the Skin Against the Stone is at the London film festival on Sunday and Monday.

Noticed how he starts out by calling Medem a Spaniard? Tremlett has nothing but contempt for the Basque people and their identity.

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