Basque filmmaker Mikel Gurrea's career thus far is remarkable: with his first feature, Suro, he competed at the San Sebastián International Film Festival in 2022, and this year, he returns to the line-up with his next one, entitled Saints, starring the same actress from his debut, Victoria Luengo. We caught up with him once again in the incomparable setting of the María Cristina Hotel in the Basque city.

Cineuropa: You made a grand entrance at the San Sebastián Film Festival with Suro, and this festival still loves you.
Mikel Gurrea: It would seem so, although since every film is different, you never know what’s going to happen. But when I got the call from its director, José Luis Rebordinos, I was over the moon because this catapults us out into the world; it’s an incredible place to present the film.

Your debut was much more luminous than Saints, right?
Yes. This one is nocturnal and urban. I write from places, from being somewhere. That was a fiction film that sprang from my experience in the forests of northern Catalonia, and this one stemmed from finding fiction in the neighbourhood where I live.

It’s also a film about and starring women.
It’s true, that’s what it ended up as. It was important to me that it be a mystery film, and perhaps that came more easily to me through the feminine. It’s also steeped in the idea of caregiving, a task that traditionally still falls to women. I live in Barcelona, but my parents are here, in San Sebastián. So when it fell to me, I had to ask myself whether I wanted to go back home to care for them, whether it’s something I do out of duty or because I truly want to. It’s hard to fathom that because with family, one's duty is a strong calling. I wanted to take Lali’s character on that journey from duty to desire.

There’s also the matter of faith to consider. Is it a lifeline?
Yes, it’s quite a respectable recourse because anything that gives you solace when you’re in difficult places seems valid to me. This country has a very strong Catholic cultural substratum, and that sometimes surfaces, especially when there’s illness or when you have to face death.

Perhaps, because of the religious theme it addresses, your film connects in some way with Sundays and Rosalía’s latest album…
Of course; when I started writing, neither of those had come out; there’s always a collective unconscious on the move. I wanted to play, cinematically, with religious iconography, which is also part of the country’s substratum. In other national film industries, like in Italy and Latin America, that’s been done a lot more. Perhaps in the south of Spain, in Andalusia, that idea of religiousness is more prominent. But from the middle of the country, heading north, things are more austere, and I wanted to explore its meanings. So if it chimes with the works you mention, so much the better. I haven’t had a close relationship with Catholicism, and I don't practise it actively, but culturally, I’m part of that tradition, and that process of playing with icons, beyond their meanings, strikes me as fun and healthy, even. Luis Buñuel did it ironically, and the Italian neorealists did it to counterpoint social themes. So it was something I wasn’t able to find in the type of cinema closest to me, and I wanted to explore it.

Los Javis do it, too, in La bola negra…
Sure, because San Sebastián is a gay icon. So yes, maybe there’s also an urge to play once again with that iconography that perhaps used to have these connotations - even political ones - that prompted rejection.

And religious images are a spectacle, too. In your film, we hear the line, “Baroque is theatricality.”
That was said to us by the person who welcomed us at the Iglesia de La Piedad, the church in Vic, the second one they rob in the story, because they showed us a trompe-l’œil there - that little theatre where a curtain would be lowered and a statue or a tabernacle would appear, and that striking line summed up that moment so well.

Speaking of heist movies, are you a fan of the genre?
Yes, yes. But in this case, it wouldn’t be banks, jewellery shops or casinos, but temples. The robbery sequences have that ritual-like component, of something done on the sly, in silence, in a coordinated, precise, careful way. And I started thinking about the films of Jules Dassin, which I love. We’ve paid homage to the genre.