Film info: Aita

Film Information

Original Title	Aita
English Title	Father
Director	José María de Orbe
Country
Year	2010
Format	35 mm
Colour	Color
Duration	85 min

Cast:

Luís Pescador, Mikel Goenaga.

Production:

Guión: José María de Orbe
Fotografía: Jimmy Gimferrer
Montaje: Cristóbal Fernández
Producción: Luís Miñarro

Synopsis

“An old uninhabited house. The man who guards it. The town’s priest. The places, the sounds, the lights, and the shadows. The time passing by. The hidden corners of the house reveal a story that’s both intimate and collective”. That’s the entire official synopsis of Aita, which is as precise as modest: there’s much, much more to watch and admire in this second film by the director of La línea recta. The synopsis doesn’t say, for example, that the uninhabited house belongs to the director’s family, or that it’s a historical building of the Basque Country; neither does it say that the guard –an impenitent atheist– and the priest are both playing themselves, or that its dialogues about death, faith and time (“time passes by slowly”, says the priest, and the clouds he’s looking at start to move and contradict him) range from moving to hilarious. And, finally, such modest synopsis doesn’t say how Aita’s rigorously free formal structuring, its simplicity in extracting beauty out of decadence, and its old films projected on walls and windows, all show that cinematographic experimentation can be as gripping and suggestive as the best ghost story.