Tasio has returned to the coal mine, to his search for happiness in nature and in a world that is withering due to emigration to the cities, with his siren song that cajoles the inhabitants of the Lokiz mountain range. The real Tasio, Anastasio Ochoa, the man who inspired Montxo Armendáriz (Olleta, 75 years old) to make the leap to feature film, died in 1989. But Tasio, The film has been revived in all its colors in a restoration directed by the Basque Film Archive that premiered at Cannes Classics in commemoration of the 40th anniversary of its release. And suddenly it has become a current cry for environmentalism and respect for fellow human beings, and a much more emotional than technical journey for Armendáriz. “Seeing it again has made me remember what the day of its premiere was like and the colleagues who are no longer here,” he confesses in Cannes.
Armendáriz fought in that filming for the authenticity of what was shown, he searched among 5,000 children from Pamplona and the Tierra Estella region for the actors to play Tasio as a child and as a young man, the production team moved around Navarre to find farming tools and utensils that matched with the time. Because the film was filmed in natural settings and the coal hills where its protagonist lives were recreated. “It was an intense filming, one of the first to be carried out in Spain with direct sound and contrary to what was usual at that time. And at the same time, pleasant. In reality, I owe a lot to Elías Querejeta [productor del filme]. I spent a year moving the script. And someone told me that Elías himself was as crazy as I was, because everyone considered the project unrealizable.”
It was a risky bet, since Tasio Not only did it require a production in the mountains, but also its script does not follow the beaten narrative paths: “It does not have a classic script, there is nowhere to grab you as a viewer, but the film is supported by the atmosphere. I did want to divide it into three phases: childhood, where there is a transmission of values from parents to children, and the child learns honesty, to love nature and understand that it gives you life; adolescence, where he enters into love, friendship and work, and adulthood, when Tasio develops everything he has acquired and new lives, births, and death appear. Only a producer like Elías Querejeta could do those crazy things. Today I know from my experience that it is much more complicated, almost impossible,” adds Armendáriz.
On the 25th anniversary of the premiere, Tasio It already had a careful edition on DVD, in a volume that included the still photos of José Luis López Linares, the script, the story board and lots of other documentation, such as hotel and meal receipts or personal mementos. Now, the novelty is at its heart: the Basque Film Library has directed the restoration carried out in the prestigious laboratories of the Cineteca of Bologna (Italy), and its screening in Cannes will be followed by a re-release in commercial theaters in France, and a long journey through festivals, such as San Sebastián. And Spain? “We’ll see. The owner of the film rights is Enrique Cerezo’s Mercury Films. We have restored it,” explains Joxean Fernández, director of the Basque Film Library, who remembers “the first day that Montxo saw the images in their fullness in Bologna, and how happy he was to surprise him.”
In that 25th anniversary volume, Querejeta wrote remembering that they began talking about the script in the spring of 1983 and continued with the talks until December; that filming began on April 9, 1984, and that as a producer he was proud that “a local coal miner visited the filming and took a while to realize that what he was seeing was not an authentic coal mine.” Both in that text and now in Armendáriz in Cannes, the two talk about a filming complicated by the weather and the immersion and reconstruction of nature. “I wanted each phase to fit with a season of the year, and it wasn’t easy. Like the sequence with the wild boar, because we hardly had any special effects,” recalls the filmmaker on the French coast.
Now, does it resist Tasio Over time? “Time is the best critic. “He decides whether a film, in general a work, lasts or not,” Armendáriz begins. “And no one is saved. I think that the premises with which I made Tasio They keep it current: his great love of nature, with which he integrated, and his great respect for others, even if they thought differently, like his brother. Those years, those of the beginning of democracy in Spain, pushed us to think that progress was going to benefit us in general. And now I think it has destroyed us all. Over time, Tasio “It has acquired added value for its ecological defense of the environment and non-violence, which is enhanced in these times of authentic disaster, both climatological and sociological.”
Armendáriz defends technological advance, but “when it benefits relationships and the human condition. The great deviation of the last three decades is that this progress has been used for the opposite, managed by neoliberalism. And no, money is not everything. We see it today, in the million-dollar profits of large companies and banking entities, while many people can’t even make ends meet with two jobs. In this imbalance there are many anonymous heroes who are fighting for values that were ultimately those of Tasio.” Will there be more Armendáriz films? “Right now I do things that I really like and, luckily, I live comfortably. You never know how projects are going. Secrets of the heart It was kept in a drawer for eight years. What is certain is that the trend of Spanish audiovisuals, what sells, is not what I present to the production companies. And in the world, the same. Cinema has changed a lot, there are no great films, but a chain of shocking, overwhelming images, films that are increasingly egocentric and more narcissistic, with their director’s editing that reflect, it is true, our society. Leave me better with Fallen Leaves, by Aki Kaurismäki.”
For all of the above, the filmmaker has not touched anything Tasio. “It was a product of its time, of an innocence, which we had because of our age and at the moment. That freshness is also lost in life,” she says. Despite himself, and laughing, he recognizes what Cannes seals: Montxo Armendáriz is already a classic.
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