It is striking to see a Colombian filmmaker working on the memory of Euskara, with a Basque sculptor in the background. How did you come across the book from which the film originates, and what attracted you to it?
This journey began in 2023, in Donostia, where I was studying, together with Celeste Rojas Mugica — the film’s producer, editor and sound designer —, in the Master’s programme in Creation at Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola (EQZE). There, in the library of the apartment where I was living, I came across a book as beautiful as it was enigmatic. It was written in Euskara; its illustrations depicted extraterrestrials and, although I could not understand the text, it contained handwritten notes in Spanish, like the traces of someone learning the language through the story.
The book was EUSKALDUN BAT MARTEN (A Basque on Mars), by Iñaki Zubeldia. As I translated it slowly, I discovered the story of a group of Basque children who receive a visit from extraterrestrials — who, mysteriously, also speak Euskara — and of Unai, one of the children and the book’s protagonist, who decides to accompany them to Mars. Before its official publication, the book circulated as photocopies among the ikastolas — schools created for teaching in Euskara — in the late 1970s. During Francoism (1939-1975), the public use of Euskara was subjected to intense repression: its presence in education, the press and literature was severely restricted.
I was especially struck by the fact that this story, with its suggestive metaphors about language and its mechanisms of transmission, circulated at the same time as many teachers were teaching Euskara in conditions that were often precarious and, in some cases, clandestine.
For those unfamiliar with it, Euskara is a language of striking singularity and, as you well know, one surrounded by mystery: its origin remains unknown, and it has no link to neighbouring languages — Spanish, French, Galician, Portuguese, Catalan — nor to any other Indo-European language. Metaphorically, it is a true extraterrestrial. I imagine that a certain fascination lies at the origin of this film. What is your relationship with the Basque language?
It was precisely the mystery surrounding the origin of Euskara, together with the strangeness of living alongside it and its everyday use over a long period, that fascinated me so deeply. This film is, among other things, a way of continuing to approach that mystery: an exploration of how this language does not merely name a reality, but also sustains it; a question about the ways of inhabiting a territory that words transmit and preserve.
I also think that, when I read the book and came across those notes in Spanish made by someone who had used it to learn Euskara, I found a kind of resonance with that curiosity and with the learning process of someone approaching the language for the first time. Over time, that relationship with language ended up shaping the very structure of the short film: the slow deciphering and translation of a sentence.
The project is drawn to language, but also to the forms of resistance and solidarity it reveals; to those subterranean communications, not always recognized and sometimes directly silenced, that run through shared space and affect.
What was the working process of the film like? I am thinking first of its conceptualization, of all the layers the film sets in motion: the book, then the fiction written from it, and finally the intersection with the writings of the sculptor Eduardo Chillida.
In parallel with studying the book, Celeste and I visited Chillida Leku, the museum that houses some of the most representative works by the Basque sculptor Eduardo Chillida. It is not a conventional museum: the pieces are displayed outdoors, among the gardens and woods that shape the visit. In general, Chillida’s work tends to inhabit open, natural spaces, establishing a singular interaction with the wind, the sea, the light, the horizon and the landscape. All of this aroused my interest, but one image struck me in particular: that of children from nearby schools running among and around those monumental structures, making them their own with the spontaneity of play.
Although, at that moment, there was still no project and no intention of making a film, that experience opened up a new concern which, later on, would help both to consolidate the fictional narrative imagined by the short film and to reflect on an artistic practice that, like language, expresses singular ways of understanding that same territory.
During that same visit to Chillida Leku, I obtained a copy of Escritos, a book that brings together texts, reflections and notes by Eduardo Chillida collected throughout his life. This material proved fundamental for thinking about the sculptor’s work and, later, provided a discursive resource that helped articulate the constellation of references, temporalities and questions we wanted to explore through the project.
I would say that the true writing of this film took place with Celeste during the editing stage. It was there that the network of associations and layers structuring the short film crystallized. In that sense, it was essential to develop the editing and sound design simultaneously, as if they were inseparable practices. Working in this way allowed rhythms, atmospheres and forms of narration to emerge that, in my view, would hardly have appeared within a more traditional and compartmentalized process.
The image work is also very interesting; it seems like a kind of stop-motion made from filmed images, or at least images printed on film stock. It is very interesting because that very materiality gives them an almost dreamlike quality. What was that process like, and why this interest in the weight, in the materiality, of images?
Before a conceptual search as such had taken shape, and long before the associations the film would eventually propose appeared, the process began as a formal and playful exploration based on the images from the book and Chillida’s sculptures. In that first stage, the work was guided by intuition and play: a series of tests with various handmade animation techniques on paper. Most of the images were first worked on digitally, then printed and intervened by hand, frame by frame, in search of different textures and tonalities. Although some of these procedures echo previous projects, each result remains distinct. There is no complete control over the behaviour of the material; precisely there, a space opens for surprise and for the emergence of unexpected forms and images.
The “hidden materials” alluded to in the short film’s title were the notebooks, primers and books handmade or reproduced by photocopy that the teachers of the ikastolas used to transmit Euskara clandestinely during the years when it was banned. We also wanted something of that silent effort, of the precariousness and materiality of those resources, to pass into the film’s own form.
There is a material dimension that also connects with the work of Eduardo Chillida: profoundly heavy sculptures that, paradoxically, appear extraordinarily light, while carrying the weight of what seems to belong to time, to landscape, to history. What led you to link the children’s story to Chillida’s work and writings?
In the short film, those sculptures are conceived as an entangled representation of time: a time that does not run in a straight line, but moves forward, backward, upward and downward. I am interested in thinking that this is also the way the film understands language: as a material capable of bringing different eras, contexts and registers of the same place into resonance.
Moreover, Chillida’s work always introduces a rupture in our perception of weight, proportion, elevation and movement. This seems very close to the procedures and concerns explored by experimental animation cinema, where precisely these alterations in perception and in the behaviour of objects become possible. This way of conceiving Chillida’s work ultimately consolidated one of the possible links between this material and the children’s story: those immense and strange bodies are sculptures, but they can also be, in a metaphorical sense, spaceships.
Interviewed by Gonzalo de Pedro
