Movies - La pelota vasca

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	Movies - La pelota vasca

La pelota vasca: la piel contra la piedra (English The Basque Ball: Skin Against Stone; Basque Euskal pilota: larrua harriaren kontra) is a 2003 documentary motion picture by Spanish filmmaker Julio Medem.

Overview

The film's purported intention is to create a bridge between the different political positions that coexist, sometimes violently, in the Basque Country. In order to do so, Medem edits the interviews giving a sense of dialogue between parties that refused to sit down and talk. Due to its lack of contextualization, the film may be hard to understand to audiences without previous knowledge of the Basque problem—it is obviously a film designed to be viewed by Spanish audiences, or people familiar with the issues.

Although aesthetically the movie moves away from the dreamy feeling of previous Medem films, there are diverse interesting cinematographical choices: the traveling camera movement used to introduce the interviews, the lack of a narrator and the helicopter shots that, with the help of the score by Mikel Laboa, effectively transport the audience to the Basque Country. The movie also utilizes footage from the Basque portions of the 1955 travelogue Around The World With Orson Welles
, and continually intercuts between interviews and jai alai players.

Criticism

One of the main controversies of the documentary is that the two principal protagonists in the polemic, the then incumbent Partido Popular and ETA refused to take part in the interviews. The former went so far as to request the organisers of the Donostia-San Sebastian International Film Festival to reconsider the film's suitability. This, in turn, has led some to call it an incomplete document.

It has also been openly criticized by both extremes, and Medem, who is Basque, has been accused of being both pro-ETA and pro-"Spanish occupation". Indeed, two of the interviewees, Iñaki Ezquerra and Gotzone Mora (both members of the intellectual pacifist group the Ermua Forum) demanded that Medem retract their interviews, accusing him of presenting the Spanish Guardia Civil and police forces as torturers and ETA and their followers as victims. Despite these protests, their interviews remained due to the film's imminent release date. They did not, however, appear on the 7-hour DVD Edition.

There is a three-disc special edition DVD (ISBN 0499015134) released with seven hours of edited footage that goes deeper into the history of the Basque Country and a Spanish-language book (ISBN 8403094256).

Awards and nominations

2004 Nominated, Goya Awards, Best Documentary
2004 Nominated, European Movie Awards, Best Documentary
2004 Nominated, Cartagena Film Festival, Best Film

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