"Amaren Eskuak" at the UCLA Film Festival

The seventh annual UCLA Latin American, Latinx, and Iberian Film Festival: Women’s Voices will be held from April 15th to 18th at the University of California at Los Angeles. This festival is supported in part by the Etxepare Euskal Institute.

The seventh annual UCLA Latin American, Latinx, and Iberian Film Festival: Women’s Voices will be held from April 15th to 18th at the University of California at Los Angeles. This festival is supported in part by the Etxepare Euskal Institute.

Basque cinema will be represented by the film Amaren eskuak (2013) by Mireia Gabilondo, a film based on the novel of the same name written by Karmele Jaio. Gabilondo will travel to Los Angeles to talk with the audience. The original soundtrack of the film is in Basque, Spanish and English, but at the festival it will be screened with Spanish subtitles.

The main person in charge of this initiative is Unai Nafarrete, the reader responsible for teaching Basque language and culture at UCLA. Nafarrete said that he "wanted to show a film in Basque, written and represented in Basque" so it is no coincidence that he chose a work by Mireia Gabilondo. Not only is the focus of this year’s festival on women, but a new Basque Studies programme has been created at UCLA with Nafarrete as director. The festival is the best opportunity to make the programme known.

The film is about a woman called Nerea. She is married to an Englishman and is the mother of a little girl. The little stability in her life slowly crumbles as her mother is put into hospital with Alzheimer. She feels guilty for not having detected the symptoms earlier. Her mother´s mind lives in the past, and she tells her daughter about her romance with a sailor called Germán. Nerea discovers things she didn’t know about her mother´s life.