Spoken Cinema: Mikel Gurrea. EU

Mikel Gurrea will share the creative process of his first film "SURO".

In an interview recorded during his residency at Ikusmira Berriak in 2016, Mikel Gurrea says:

There are two images that have been in my retina since I spent a summer peeling cork in Alt Empurdá. But, above all, there is one that concentrates the tension that I am interested in exploring in the film. The image is an axe, a pickaxe, hitting the bark of a cork oak hard, but without harming the tree. Every time the ax is stabbed in, it lifts that bark a little and it peels away until finally what would be the inner trunk of the tree is discovered, which would be raw and red and sweaty and almost bleeding.

That image, of that tree that is peeled, of that bark that is removed, with an ancient technique that requires a lot of care, but at the same time exerts a certain violence on the tree, concentrates the tension of the film, which is that tension between what internal and external.

Mikel Gurrea began the project for his first feature film, Suro, at his residence in Ikusmira Berriak in 2016 and six years later he premiered it in the Official Section of the San Sebastian Festival, winning the Fipresci, Irizar and Euskal prizes gidoigileen elkartea. In the Tabakalera Talking Cinema session, he will tell us the secrets of the process of making his first feature film. We could ask him, for example, if that image he describes in the interview has been with him throughout the process of creating the film.