OSKAR ALEGRIA (ZUMIRIKI DIRECTOR) INTERVIEW
Oskar's house was in the middle of the Arga River: an island of trees and sand, now covered by water. The man returns to his father's shores to photograph the memory of what he has lost: his darkroom is a cabin, covered by foliage; his gaze is a naked eye, the eye of a shepherd who films without thought or time. Oskar collects and composes fragments of stories that few in his Navarra remember, tracing a multifaceted path. Sitting next to those who are about to leave his home, in solitude, he waits for a single sign in the darkness that falls: Zumiriki is an ancient word, it belongs to an almost forgotten language. But it is also a physical space, which now no longer exists, towards which Oskar Alegria insists on turning his gaze. While every tree, animal and object seems to hide from time, the director relies on the waves that have swept away every sign of his past, sinking into his own memory.
How did you come up with the idea of this “primitive hermitage”? Which was your need?
I think is a human need. To go back to the days of our childhood, that’s a common and beaten track. It is not only to live in nature and to recover the old days when the clocks and watches didn't work. Is also to disconnect with the present and to hide in our own memories. To try to live twice thanks to the great magic of cinema.
Your film works on so many layers, it always surprises with fresh ideas, new paths and different techniques. Could you please tell me how you organized the filmmaking workflow? Did you have a script before the shooting or did you write it during your stay in the cabine? Or did you set it during the editing phase? How long did the project take?
In the beginning my first idea was to write a book, a notebook with the trees of the island. And that's in the film, it became a script. I also wrote a diary drawn up in the form of letters, like all castaways do, letters thrown in a bottle to the river, abandoned, with no destination, and the film also took that letters as a script. It is always said that the book is better than the film based on it... so maybe I wanted also to break that idea, to put directly the book in the film, to make it as I was writing it on a paper.
Zumiriki means “island in the middle of the river”; often man is portrayed between the earth and the sky: in my opinion the old shepherds filmed in the darkness manage to place themselves between the visible and the invisible. Do you think traditions play a key role in this?
Of course. And mythology. This Zumiriki and the forest around it is the only place in the world that I know where science fails in its answers, even more in its questions. Is the last corner where you find solutions just trusting in magic... As these old shepherds you mention advised me, if you want to become invisible in the forest, you must carry with you a colored feather that the thrush hides in its nest ... and so it is.
In your film the deterioration of memory is combined with the disappearance of a physical space: how much does the human impact on the Earth affect the man’s spirituality?
Hmm, great question. It is also the disappearance of an ancient language that for me is that landscape. Look, the first thing that is lost when a dam is built in a river is the sound of the current, the waters go silent, they enter in silence. The same happens with the language of the place, if you alter the landscape the old words no longer work, they become stagnant. So, answering your question, if we stop saying Zumiriki the island will disappear, as long as we say the word it will exist, even if it is under water. It is a shipwrecked voice that we can bring to the surface, again thanks to the magic of cinema.
On which film project are you working on?
I have to admit that my passion is to capture these voices about to disappear, because they have a special shine before saying goodbye ... I am interested in that long agony and its sparkle. I am working on the word butterfly in the Basque language. A century ago there was a great philologist, Louis Lucien Bonaparte, nephew of the emperor, who compiled 127 different ways of saying butterfly in our valleys. Pinpilinpauxa, Mitxeleta, Mitxirrika. We have never known why this abundance and precision in this beautiful and particular animal, carrier of dreams and big metaphors. Nabokov also admired that richness in our language. My idea is to know how many of these 127 names are still alive and especially to register and know about their last speakers. At the moment I have 53 words and speakers, some of them are the only ones who remember concrete names and with them those butterflies will leave our landscape. It's again like a black box project, recording last voices before the end comes.
Q: Giovanni Benini
