Made with:
Helena Estrela, Mariana Sanchez Bueno, Ren Ebel, Unai Ruíz Ameztoy, Kair Ruíz Alonso, Martina Ruíz Alonso, Jessica Lee, Gabrielle Pulgar, Clara Rus, Christina C.Nguyen.Made in the Basque Country/Euskadi, 2021
Special thanks to Gry Kipperberg, Francesco Scavetta, Kimuak and LUX, London.
Lertxundi's first film since relocating to Spain from California in 2019 is a triptych composed of three independent and yet interrelated pieces – Teatrillo, Inner Outer Space and Under the Nothing Night. A new setting for the filmmaker but the same sun-drenched blue sky and sea. Like all of Lertxundi's work, Inner Outer Space is a film about relationships – between characters, between characters and landscape, between image and sound – but also, and ultimately, a deconstruction of the production process that highlights materiality and artifice. Just like the blindfolded woman in the film who attempts to orientate herself in a new geography, Lertxundi is learning – through the making of a film – to reacquaint herself with the landscape of her native Basque Country. The concluding chapter – in which two young women perform a mysterious choreography to the projected images of waves – is an outburst of pure feeling. --Teatrillo
2.5min, 16mm, color, silent, 2021
A pair of hands stage various arrangements of images within a small cardboard model for an unrealized three-channel film installation. The title's double meaning–both "little theater" and "faking it"–alludes to the plans for a work becoming the work itself.
Inner Outer Space
8min, 16mm, color, sound, 2021
A brief meditation on the geography of ideas, located between interiority and environment, individual and community. A group of non-actors sort through pages of printed film stills which suddenly come to life. In the Basque mountains, they carry out a variety of sensory group exercises including tele- pathic conversation, blindfolded walks and plein air sketches.
Under the Nothing Night
6min, 16mm, color, sound, 2021
Two unnamed female characters, trapped between image and projection, perform languid choreography set against a backdrop of seascapes and bucolic children's cartoons.