Zumiriki

“Zumiriki” is a Basque word meaning “island in the middle of a river”. In this very personal essay film, Oskar Alegría returns to a place central to his childhood – a spot in the Pyrenees where an island has disappeared, submerged by a nearby dam, leaving only a few treetops in the middle of a river that is now a lake. Inspired by the Super 8 films made years earlier by his father, a member of the local shepherding community, Alegria returns to the spot, building a hut that doubles as a camera obscura for capturing images of the terrain. His months in hermit-like isolation became an extended feat of performance art, during which Alegria produces a series of intimate tributes to the spirit of the place – including drawings of trees, contemplations on the Basque landscape, and an extraordinary project in night photography, as an array of nocturnal fauna present themselves as ghostly familiar presences. In the tradition of modern landscape art, and showing affinities with contemporary cinematic avant-ruralists such as Ben Rivers and Andrew Kötting, ZUMIRIKI is at once a conceptual adventure and an act of devotion, a hymn to nature made with love, humour, and inexhaustible invention. (Jonathan Romney)

In the presence of Oskar Alegria.