About Basque Cinema
The controversy engendered by Julio Medem’s Basque Ball: The Skin Against the Stone is only the latest bout in a struggle to represent and explore Basque identity on film. Early travelogues celebrated a unique landscape and heritage that had bred an indomitable race, and this Romantic notion of a historically, linguistically and culturally isolated nation in mainland Europe, with provinces spilling either side of the Pyrenees, would also charm foreign writers and film-makers such as Orson Welles.
However, following the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), hagiography was countered by the oppressive policies and tactics of Franco’s dictatorship (1939-75), which forbade the right of assembly and the use of the Basque language of Euskera, and drove dissenters into private film clubs that were a cover for political debate. Consequently, the union of political thought and action with film theory and practice propagated a forceful faith in documentary films as instruments of record and propaganda.