When he was a child, Paul Urkijo went with his parents to the mountains, to the rivers, to the caves in the valleys of Euskadi and they told him the legends of those places “of the sirens with the feet of birds, of the lamias, of Mari ...” Those excursions sparked the imagination of Urkijo, who fell in love with “the pagan deities that perpetuated themselves in the oral tradition of Basque”.
And as an adult, all that passion was transformed into cinema. First in multi-award winning shorts at various festivals. Then in a feature film, Errementari (2016), and now in a second feature film, Irati , shot in Basque that has passed through the Sitges Festival and already smells like a prize.
Urkijo moves to the Pyrenees in the 8th century to "literalize" the battle of Roncesvalles (778) and tell the story of Eneko, the son of the lord of the land who, after receiving a Christian education, returns home to take power, but he is forced to face earthly and mythical enemies, such as Mari, "the mother Goddess, symbol of a matriarchal religion, of a pre-Indo-European faith whose existence is documented in different and remote places."
"Irati is an epic story in the Middle Ages that they call dark, the most unknown and also the most plagued by mythology," says Urkijo. Irati (Edurne Azkarate) is also the beautiful mermaid who will accompany Eneko in the fight against his enemies and the search for her father's body and Charlemagne's treasure.
