euskalkultura.eus

Donostia-San Sebastian.  Gartxot, an animated picture directed by Juanjo Elordi and Asisko Urmeneta, premiered last November, and since then has had an intense journey through theaters, cultural centers, and international festivals.

“We just won an award at the Auburn Film Festival in Australia,” Juanjo Elordi told EuskalKultura.com.  “It is a children’s film festival and we are very happy because this means that those are the spectators who gave us this award.”

Online

The film can now also be seen online on www.filmotech.com.  The price of a viewing is 2.95 euros.  The film is available in Basque, Spanish, English, French, Catalan and Galician.  Other Basque feature films can also be seen on this site.  This is a very good way to support Basque film.  Simply put the movie’s title in the search box and the option to view will appear.

The tragic story of the bard of Itzaltzu is also a cry in favor of the Basque language – Gartxot and his son suffer persecution by the church and so they quit singing the traditional songs in Basque, that is, the oral history of the town – and for that reason its directors, Juanjo Elordi and Asisko Urmeneta wanted to go a bit further when it came time to subtitle the film.  “Besides the versions that we put online, we also subtitled it in 19 minority languages: Kurd, Breton, Occitan, Georgian, Aymara…we did it through a network of solidarity with people who contacted us and volunteered to do the translation,” Juanjo Elordi told EuskalKultura.com.  These versions are available on DVD.

The movie will be at the Basque Film Festival hosted by Berlin’s Euskal Etxea in November and a special screening is being organized in Buenos Aires, according to Elordi.  “One of Gartxot’s operas debuted in Buenos Aires after the war, and now we are talking with the Laurak Bat Basque club about doing a special showing there.”

For more information about the movie, here.