Basque film-maker Julio Medem's latest film has caused a political storm, but he is standing his ground, writes Paddy Woodworth
Nobody used to think of Julio Medem as a political film-maker. He belongs to the 1990s generation of Basque directors who do not generally share the passions of their predecessors about Spain's transition from dictatorship to democracy. His first five films, ranging from Vacas (Cows) to Sex and Lucía, were outrageous and successful surrealist explorations of themes of personal identity, love, sex and death. His work was magical, not Marxist. He was, in fact, accused by a critic of "refusing to engage with the reality of the Basque Country".
This is well illustrated by an exchange at the London Film Festival in 1996. He was answering questions at a screening of Tierra (Earth), a film whose protagonist may or may not be dead, and who wanders into a bizarre rural landscape drenched in eroticism and danger, while pondering the relationship between a plague of woodlice and the taste of the local wine.
"What does your film have to do with the liberation of the Basque Country?" demanded an English armchair revolutionary. Medem is a charming but very unassuming man, who prefers to avoid talking about his films at all if he can help it, and is, even now, a reluctant polemicist. "You had better ask my psychoanalyst about that," he replied laconically.
In 2003, however, Medem suddenly became the bête noir of the Spanish political and intellectual establishments. He was called the Leni Riefenstal of Basque cinema. He was accused of glamourising the terrorism of ETA and of diminishing the dignity of its victims. The Spanish embassy in London described Medem, by now one of the most distinguished directors working in Spain, as persona non grata when his film Basque Ball: the Skin Against the Stone came to the London Film Festival. Letters obtained by a Spanish journalist show that the embassy boycotted the event, following government policy.
At the Dublin International Film Festival in February, the Instituto Cervantes refused to support a Medem retrospective. Festival sources insist that this was because they were screening The Basque Ball. The institute's director here, Julio Crespo MacLennan, is equally insistent that his decision was based on budgetary considerations, and denies that he received any instructions from Madrid to withdraw funding.
Many people who saw the film in Dublin expressed amazement afterwards that it could have provoked such a firestorm of negative reaction from people who claimed to be defending democracy. What they saw, they commented, was a meticulously crafted documentary in which many very different voices expressed diverse opinions on the conflict in the Basque Country.
Some of those interviewed had lost loved ones to ETA, one had lost most of a leg in an ETA bombing, and several of them had to share their lives with 24-hour bodyguards because of ETA death threats. One woman, it is true, claimed to have been tortured as an ETA suspect by the Spanish security forces, and another spoke about the suffering imposed by the Spanish policy of holding ETA prisoners in jails hundreds of miles from home. These are issues which any serious film about the Basque conflict would have to raise.
The vast majority of participants were emphatic in their abhorrence of violence and support for democracy. The title is a reference to a Basque sport known as pelota or jai alai. The film is tautly but flexibly edited, so that words from one speaker bounce against the words of another, alternately smacking painfully and resonating evocatively, like balls in a Bilbao handball alley.
No contemporary ETA member appears in the film. Medem is understandably elusive as to whether or not he approached them, but it appears that the group now regrets not participating. There is, however, a little Gerry Adams-speak from Arnaldo Otegi, leader of ETA's recently banned political wing, Batasuna, and some of his colleagues, though they are far from a dominant presence. The other absentees are the conservatives of Spain's Partido Popular (PP), in government when the film was being made, and some eminent anti-nationalist left-wing intellectuals. Both groups, who have formed a rather unnatural alliance over the Basque question, refused repeated invitations to take part, and then lambasted the film for lack of balance.
"I knew bad things could happen because of this film," Medem says ruefully, "but I never imagined the injustice, the scale of the slanders that would be made against me." He is particularly hurt by allegations from Basque journalists whose work he has always respected. José Luis Barbaría is a highly professional reporter for El País who knows the Basque Country inside out, and has lived under the grim shadow of ETA threats for years. Barbaría wrote that Medem "not only refuses to show the difference between the real, flesh-and-blood victims and the imaginary victims, but he goes so far as to establish an explicit parallel between the plight of the widow of an Ertzaina [Basque police officer] and her orphan son, and that of the wife and son of an imprisoned ETA activist".
"There is no attempt to make a moral equivalence between the situation of the Ertzaina widow and the wife of the prisoner," Medem responds wearily.
"The most moving point here is that the widow of the Ertzaina says that the worst thing that could happen to her is that her son should hate, and want to kill someone else because his father was killed." Where the fulcrum of the film lies is something each viewer must decide for themselves, but it certainly seemed to this writer that its sympathy was overwhelmingly with the victims of violence, and that ETA's violence was, as one of the victims puts it, "most of all an insult to the Basque Country they claim to love". Medem has no great faith in nationalism of any stripe, and has always been reluctant even to define himself as a "Basque director" - he was born in San Sebastián of Spanish, French, Basque and German grandparents. But he is totally unambiguous, personally, regarding ETA.
"I am accused of 'cowardly equidistance', of refusing to take a position against ETA. I was equidistant in the sense that I wanted as many people as possible to have their say in the film. But I am not morally equidistant.
"The basic problem in the Basque Country is ETA's terrorism, let me be quite clear about that.
"And let me say emphatically, so that there can be no misunderstanding, that the situation of those who are deprived of liberty and of life itself because of ETA's death threats seems to me the worst and most disturbing aspect of this conflict. But it is not the only problem we have. I want ETA to disappear, right now and forever. But there are other violences in the Basque Country, which come from the State and its agents. But to say this is to be accused of being a terrorist supporter."
What drove him, I wondered, from the comfort of being an acclaimed arthouse director to the centre of the Basque cyclone? In the introduction to the massive book based on the film, he explains his own political evolution from the moment he left the Basque Country for Madrid in 1996, exhausted and frustrated by "the ideas and the people that, with an ancient and obstinate dignity, make sure that the Basque conflict is perpetuated".
This "plague on both your houses" attitude soon began to shift. José María Aznar's Partido Popular (PP) had just brought the centre-right back to power in Spain. He was "horrified", he says, by what he felt was an accelerating tendency to use ETA's terrorism as a thinly disguised excuse for an offensive against Basque nationalism, as represented by the democratic Basque Nationalist Party (PNV), and even against Basque culture in general.
"As a Basque living in Madrid, I found that the mainstream Spanish media almost totally lacked other voices on the moral and political problem of my country, I mean the nuances, that whole range of colours which we all know exist between black and white. It is very unjust, and terribly dangerous, when those in power . . . set out to create a single orthodox way of thinking, based on the principle that 'if you are not with me, you are against me'. On the international level, they did the same thing: 'if you are not in favour of war on Iraq, then you are an accomplice of Saddam Hussein'.
"In fact," he continues, "anyone who suggested that Basque nationalism in general is not the root of ETA's violence, that the PNV is not an accomplice of ETA, are themselves accused of being accomplices of ETA. One of the words they [the PP\] have perverted is the word 'dialogue'. Now anyone who even advocates dialogue is accused of being an ETA sympathiser."
The Spanish political context has, of course, changed significantly since our interview at the film festival in February. José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero's new Socialist Party government says it is committed to a "plural Spain", and has already re-initiated the kind of dialogue with the PNV which was so recently utterly taboo. The new atmosphere may prove more congenial for the film Medem is working on at the moment, Aitor, a fictional and "operatic" treatment of some of the themes of his documentary.
The main character, Medem says, is someone who is "incapable of hating anything, even hatred itself". That sounds a bit like the mild-mannered director who, while clearly badly bruised by the mauling he has received at the hands of politicians and commentators, always seems more saddened than angered by their response.
"I can leave the hatred behind," he says. "I feel very supported, very loved. And that support is real, genuine, whereas the hatred against me is part of a campaign, a strategy, something artificial.
"This experience has been a nightmare, but to a degree it has inoculated me against fear. The concerns that all filmmakers have about a film, whether it will be badly received or misinterpreted, now seem almost inconsequential to me. Indeed, I also feel inoculated against hatred."
Basque Ball; the Skin Against the Stone runs at the Irish Film Institute, Dublin until June 24th. Excerpts can be viewed at www.lapelotavasca.net
Paddy Woodworth is a commentator on Spanish affairs and author of Dirty War, Clean Hands: ETA, the GAL and Spanish Democracy
'The support is real, genuine, whereas the hatred against me is part of a campaign, a strategy, something artificial'