Obaba

Montxo Armendáriz : 2005

Lourdes, a young film student, has travelled to Obaba in the Basque regions of northern Spain for a college project. A place full of mystery and charm, she wants to capture Obaba's reality, its world and its people. She wants to catch the present, and show it the way it is. But Obaba is not the place that Lourdes had imagined, and she discovers that the people who live there are trapped in a past they cannot, or they do not want to escape from. Through them and Miguel, a happy and easy-going young boy she strikes up a close friendship with, Lourdes comes to know small pieces of their lives – from before, when they were children or adults, and from now, when they barely have any dreams. These are small fragments of lives that lead to passions, envies and violence. With all this, Lourdes tries to reconstruct the puzzle that gives sense to their lives and that will allow her to catch the reality with her video camera. But still, she has difficulty capturing the essence of Obaba on camera. There is always something missing, something that escapes, and something she cannot understand.