The San Sebastian Film Festival has rejected public calls for it to withdraw a Netflix documentary from its line-up that features an exclusive interview with a former leader of Basque terrorist group ETA.
Directed by Jordi Évole and Màrius Sánchez, No Me Llame Ternera is set to open the festival’s Made in Spain section on September 22.
The documentary explores some of ETA’s decisive moments until it disbanded in 2018, and has an interview between Évole and Josu Urrutikoetxea, also known as Josu Ternera, in what the festival bills as a “harsh and innovative look at his background as leader of the ETA terrorist organisation.”
ETA was a Basque separatist organisation in Spain that used terrorism as part of its campaign for an independent Basque state. It orchestrated a wave of killings, kidnappings and bombings from the 1960s until it was disbanded.
On Monday, Spanish newspaper El Diario Vasco published a letter signed by 514 people opposing the world premiere. The signatories included politicians, ETA victims, journalists and professors. It accused the documentary of being “part of the whitewashing process of ETA and the tragic terrorist history in our country, converted into a justifying and trivializing story that puts murderers and accomplices, victims and resisters on the same level.”
Responding to the letter, San Sebastian festival director José Luis Rebordinos said “we do not share their opinion that the film No Me Llame Ternera should be withdrawn from the programme.”
He said the documentary “neither justifies nor whitewashes ETA, because this Festival would not screen a film with such premises.”
Rebordinos went on to say that cinema is, “among many other things, a source of history and has often endeavoured to take to the big screen protagonists, perpetrators of episodes of unjustifiable violence, but at whom it has wanted to take a closer look.”
He cited films such as Claude Lanzmann’s classic Holocoast documentary Shoah as well as Rithy Panh’s S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine and Joshua Oppenheimer and Christine Cynn’s The Act Of Killing about mass killings in Indonesia.
“At the end of the day, we consider that the film No Me Llame Ternera should be seen first and criticised later, and not the other way around,” said Rebordinos, who also offered to organise a private screening for a small number of people representing the letter writing group.
On the San Sebastian website, the directors of the film say they have made it “because we have a responsibility towards the history of our country, which is partly marked by the terrorism of ETA, and we felt it was a unique opportunity to interview someone who belonged to that terrorist organisation. It is also essential that the film serves as an educational tool for the whole generation that has decided to forget or not to look at this very recent episode of our history. It is an exercise in historical memory.”
After its premiere at the festival, No me llame Ternera will be available on Netflix. San Sebastian runs from September 22-30.
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