‘Irati’, the new fantasy phenomenon in Basque that is inspired by ‘Princess Mononoke’

Since its premiere on February 24, ‘Irati’ has not stopped growing: the new film by Paul Urkijo Alijo rose as the best premiere in Basque in history and is on its way to becoming the new Basque-speaking phenomenon: has been the most watched film in cinemas in the Basque Country for the second week in a row, surpassing the rest of the films on the billboard, and has more than 80,000 viewers in its first ten days on the billboards in the whole of Spain. After receiving five nominations in the last edition of the Goya Awards 2023 and after directing his debut feature, ‘Errementari (The Blacksmith and the Devil)’, we spoke with the person in charge of ‘Irati’, Paul Urkijo, about the keys, secrets and references that inspired this new medieval fantasy story.

Fantasy and reality: the passion of a storyteller

“As long as I continue to have opportunities, I’m going to be faithful to fantasy and the fantastic. At the moment, I don’t understand any other way of expressing myself as a filmmaker and as an artist, I would even say as a person. Since I started drawing things, since I started writing and directing shorts, since I premiered ‘Errementari (The Blacksmith and the Devil)’ and now that ‘Irati’ will finally reach the public at the end of February, this is the wonderful world of legends, tales and beings that exist because everything that has a name exists, in which I want to remain”. Listening to Paul Urkijo (Vitoria, 1984) speak with such passion about his second feature –led by Eneko Sagardoy, Edurne Azkarate and Itziar Ituño and which is freely inspired by the characters of the graphic novel ‘El ciclo de Irati’, by JL Landa and J. Muñoz– confirms a truly passionate director, a storyteller (or a storyteller, a definition he himself claims). “I want to continue being the boy to whom his father told extraordinary stories when we went to the forest. I want to share them with the audience. And I also want to be the kid who discovered, many of them on video or on TV, adventure movies, sword and witchcraft, which is what I’ve always wanted to do”.

“The road to ‘Errementari’ took me about eight years,” recalls Urkijo with a (ironic?) smile. “Irati’s has only been six”, he smiles again. “I hope to shorten the gap in my next film (the smile is complete). I always go for the sack, I am one of those who do the double somersault in each project, but my health heals a lot because when I appear before a producer I am already very clear about what I want to tell and how. I prepare a bookthat teaches us: a beauty that should be published commercially) with all the design and concept art from the film. It is my way of showing that I may be talking about a mythological and fantasy argument, but that for me it is all real, everything is feasible to reproduce in reality, which is a movie.”

In the depth of the forest. in times of witches

“I suppose that for a current blockbuster everything is simpler, more controllable, if you shoot it in a studio and then in post-production you recreate those worlds where the action takes place. I’ve never worked on any, I don’t know what I would do”, laughs the director with that kind of temptation in the future. “What I do know, and that in terms of production it was expensive, laborious and hard, is that I had to shoot in real natural settings. Not only to provide the elements of mythology and fantasy with a base, a real texture, but because Irati speaks deep down about the earth, about Mother Earth. The great goddess, the origin of Basque mythology, comparable to all the primitive Venus we know, is born from her and represents her. The earth is moistened with blood, it thrives on the rain, it sees fantastic beings and humans pass by, it provides shelter for some, and it seeks to remain forever.If the filming plan required going down into a cave for 20 minutes and staying there for a whole day, without even going out to relieve ourselves, we stayed there.”

“You are naming me the titles that have been my references in ‘Irati'”, agrees Paul Urkijo. There is a lot, treated in a very intelligent way without ever losing the sense of epic and spectacularity (the bloody battle shot in almost sequence shot), of works that spoke of the clash between paganism and Christianity, of how the latter absorbed syncretic to the first as ‘The Lord of War’ (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1965), ‘Excalibur’ (John Boorman, 1981) or ‘The Dragon of the Lake of Fire’ (Matthew Robbins, 1981). “The film”, continues the director, “talks about these two worlds that intersect. In one there are fantastic creatures, witches… In the other, warriors, clerics, kings…” And there is a character, the pagan, the one who accompanies the male hero, who is female. “I have not looked for a prefabricated feminist discourse,” Urkijo points out, “but it is evident that it is the character of Edurne Azkarate, who gives the film its title, the one who breaks with the cliché of the hero of the Apollonian ideal who stands as the only savior. These We talked about things a lot before shooting with Edurne and Eneko (Sagardoy). Although I am a director with a reputation for being a perfectionist and for not changing a single comma in the script, this time I have been more open to synergy with the team.”

‘Princess Mononoke’: My Favorite Fantasy

“For me it is THE movie. It has everything. And everything is in my cinema and especially in ‘Irati’.” Paul Urkijo talks about ‘Princess Mononoke’ (Hayao Miyazaki, 1997), one of the best Studio Ghibli films and animation gems from its Japanese director. “There are those two worlds in it, the fantasy world and the modern one that is a threat, treated as I treat mythology: as something real. It is an openly ecological film, which talks about the earth. In it, in reality, there is no neither good nor bad characters. And there’s her, Mononoke, my ‘Irati’.”