“I am the first surprised that ETA has become something mainstream“. This is how the filmmaker and playwright spoke on Thursday Jon Viar at the presentation in Donostia of Traitors, the documentary he has directed about the figure of his father, Iñaki Viar, one of the promoters of the Ermua Forum and previously sentenced to 20 years in prison by the Franco regime because of his participation as member of a seminal ETA in a bomb attack on the Bilbao Stock Exchange in the late 1960s. Traidores sIt can be seen tomorrow Friday at the Principal Theater on the opening day of the 18th edition of the Film and Human Rights Festival. Although it can be framed within the rise of fictions about the Basque conflict that in recent times have occurred in the audiovisual, such as the Invisible line O Homeland, for Viar and his family, it responds to a personal need to “explain the horror lived.” “If now you can make movies about a totalitarian Nazi monster that was ETA, it is because it no longer kills”, has stated.
This non-fiction story deals with a well-known story – “the history of ETA is extremely boring” – from an “intimate” and, at the same time, unusual point of view; the filmmaker himself assumes that will “bother” part of the Basque population. Not in vain, Traidores is very critical of nationalism. “It is a story that is transferred from parents to children,” Viar assured. In his case, nationalism was rooted in his family from the 19th century until his father, Iñaki Viar, broke with the family “tradition” during his time in the Segovia prison. Viar was arrested in 1969 by the Political-Social Brigade and was part of the Burgos process. He was also one of the ideologues of the Segovia escape. Although he was sentenced to 20 years, he was released from prison in 1977 thanks to the Amnesty Law.
When he was young, the filmmaker discovered that his father had been with ETA, something that shocked him, especially because of his vehement stance towards terrorism. In this sense, he began to realize that his family’s environment was conditioned by the existence of the organization, firstly by their participation in its origins and, later, by being threatened by it: “I have always been obsessed with evil and the closest metaphor for evil I have ever known has been ETA”. Viar reproduces in his documentary the testimonies of those people considered “traitors to ETA” and their “intrahistory”, focusing, of course, on the figure of his father. In this sense, he speaks of an “inherited trauma” in search of a “catharsis”.
Mikel Azurmendi, Jon Juaristi, Teo Uriarte Y Ander Landaburu are some of those interviewed in a documentary that is completed with home-made films of the Viar family, including fragments of home-made short films filmed when he was a teenage filmmaker and in which terrorism was also very present: “In a very natural way I get to make shorts about ETA. Maybe I was never interested in making a political speech“.
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