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Basque Film Series - Zumiriki (Islet)

Hosted by the Basque Educational Organization and sponsored by the Basque Cultural Center.

Admission is FREE, but reservations are required. Please let the BEO know you’re coming by clicking here.

The film’s director, Oskar Alegria, will be at the Basque Cultural Center to present his film and do a Q&A following the screening.

A hosted 7:00pm meet and greet reception will be done before the 7:30pm screening.

Is it possible to travel twice to the same memory? The filmmaker built a cabin on an isolated riverbank, just opposite his childhood island, which had disappeared under the water after the construction of a dam. The goal was to go back to that place, which had become invisible. Only the trees of the island where he'd played stood firm in the middle of the water, like the masts of a broken toy, so the air was the only space left, the only vestige of the past to be conquered.

This film is a diary of a castaway in memories; four months of a Walden experience in a lost paradise with two hens, a small vegetable garden and a clock that stopped forever at 11:36 and 23 seconds.

2019, Directed by Oskar Alegria 122 minutes, color, in Euskara with English subtitles.

About the director Oskar Alegria

Oskar Alegria Suescun (Pamplona, Spain, 1973) is a film director, programmer, and professor. He has worked as a journalist on “El viajero,” produced by El País, and on the TV news programs produced by Canal Plus y CNN+. He has coordinated the cultural program Los cinco sentidos (Telemadrid) and the literature program Sautrela (Euskal Telebista), where he also directed the cooking documentaries Sukalde Maisuak: Maestros de la cocina, comprising five films about Arzak, Subijana, Berasategi, Aduriz, and Arbelaitz, respectively.

Alegria Suescun’s debut feature-length film, La casa Emak Bakia [The Search for Emak Bakia], (2012), about the quest to find the house on the Basque-French coast where Man Ray shot a film of the same name, was shown at 70 international festivals and received 15 prizes, including the Maysles Brothers Award for Best Documentary Film at the Denver Film Festival and the Navaja de Buñuel prize for Best Spanish Film, awarded by the TV show “Versión Española” and the Spanish Society of Authors and Publishers.

For the past four years, he has been the artistic director of the Punto de Vista International Documentary Film Festival of Navarra, where he also coordinated and published the books TIME about the relationship between time and cinema, and Oteiza al margen, about the notes and screenplays of Basque filmmaker Jorge Oteiza. He has served as a jury member for the film festivals of San Sebastián, Karlovy Vary, RIDM in Montreal, Cinéma du Réel in Paris, and New Horizons in Wroclaw, Poland.

Oskar Alegria has also directred Gure Oroitzapenak (2018), Zumiriki (2019), Zinzindurrunkarratz (2023).

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