Penínsulas

Singing rap. Biting your nails. Eating a whole apple with its seeds. A yellow pill, your gold watch, and performing for people. Ten minutes to midnight and it'll be the last time we see each other.

A voice travels across the snowy mountains of Polio. It interrupts the quietude of the place, before vanishing into the landscape. A man walks through the immense valley, above a dense mantle of snow, looking for Fita, his loyal dog who has gone lost leaving no track.

In a village in Andalusia the streets are being raised, maybe they were raised before. A woman listens to the whispers of María la Oscura, in the echoes brought by the wind hidden in the cracks of the landscape.

Rotor portrays a series of still objects on display filmed over the last six years: Wankel engines, clocks and armillary spheres, pianos, and apples. The intuitions, dreams and technical developments of decades reflected in each of them: speed and progress, the rotation of heavenly bodies, gravity, the summer-ripened apples hanging from trees.

Lertxundi’s first film since relocating to Spain from California in 2019 is a triptych composed of three independent and yet interrelated pieces: Teatrillo, Inner Outer Space and Under the Nothing Night. A new setting for the filmmaker but the same sun-drenched blue sky and sea. Like all of Lertxundi’s work, Inner Outer Space is a film about relationships –between characters, between the characters and landscape, between image and sound– but also, and ultimately, a deconstruction of the production process that highlights materiality and artifice. Just like the blindfolded woman in the film who attempts to orientate herself in a new geography, Lertxundi is learning –through the making of a film– to reacquaint herself with the landscape of her native Basque Country. The concluding chapter (in which two young women perform a mysterious choreography to the projected images of waves) is an outburst of pure feeling.