ORIA FILMS

When I think about Obaba, the first thing that comes to mind is the mirror at Norwich Cathedral in England.Despite being small in size, it is capable of reflecting every single detail of the entire cathedral.I believe I tried to do something similar. To create a little world that talks about the greater one. Creating lives that talk about life in general. It is from this perspective that stories like the schoolteacher or the engineer Werfell should be understood.They are specific stories linked to a time and place, but do not acquire full meaning unless they make us think of loneliness, love, uprooting and other equally important issues.

Bernardo Atxaga

Obaba is about the nature of mystery, the quest for the unknown, of things unsaid, but also about what we say and do: looks, gestures and attitudes which, sometimes consciously, often unintentionally, determine the meaning of our existence.

Montxo Armendáriz

Two points about Lourdes

(Montxo Armendáriz)

1. Why does Lourdes go to Obaba? Why does she go across the streets with a camera taping everything she watches? The spectator probably thinks about these and other questions during the first half of the film. This is part of the game, of Lourdes’s story, who travels through the characters and the geography of Obaba without the spectator knowing the reason or the aim of her behaviour, although they can be guessed. This lack of information –planned in advance– is part of the mystery that surrounds Lourdes, a mystery where casualty or perhaps fate play an important role –as well as in the rest of stories–. Only when Lourdes returns to the city, to her world, we discover that she has gone to Obaba to tape a practicum ordered in the School and that her friend Carlos (Esteban’s nephew) was who told her about Obaba. But, as it usually happens, when something is known, it loses its value, and in this moment of the story, this piece of information that interests us so much, it hardly has any importance, it has lost its interest, because the most important thing for the spectator, now, is what has happened to Lourdes, what she has lived, the knowledge of something new –the unknown, the mystery, perhaps a lizard that goes into her head?– that has changed her idea of reality. In this way –as well as in the other stories– something unimportant and by chance (Lourdes’s travel to Obaba) turns into the key element that changes her life’s direction.

2. Lourdes has the safety of the unconscious, the confidence of people who don’t know themselves, the stability of people lacking responsibilities. Lourdes has an easy laugh, a clean look because she is at the life threshold, she doesn’t know pain, fear or crying. Her trip to Obaba opens the doors of another reality, other lives, other people. She discovers through them love, friendship, envy, loneliness, violence. She also discovers the fear of the unknown, the mystery of the inaccessible. Because knowledge is neither linear nor transparent, and many times it generates uncertainty, doubts, distress and pain. Due to all these reasons, after her trip to Obaba, Lourdes is not the same person. Something is moving inside her –a lizard?–, something is changing, and Lourdes faces a new future, a new way of understanding life. But there are still mysteries, facts, circumstances Lourdes doesn’t understand, but she goes on. And in the same way that the knowledge of other lives changed hers, Lourdes sends a letter to Esteban in a cream-colored envelope. A letter Esteban has been waiting for many years and it can possibly also change his life’s direction. They are little acts, little details, most of the times imperceptible and puzzling –are they by chance, or was it destiny?– that determine the sense of our being.

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