This makes it an accurate and ultimately rewarding film but one which lacks the Hollywood gloss of more biased, fictionalised pictures. Malo handles a sensitive political topic with an even hand and an appropriate distance from both parties. Their fate is a foregone conclusion: Lasa & Zabala deals with the fight to bring the truth to modern Spain. Once the identities of Lasa and Zabala, as well as their fates and the major players involved, become clearer, the pace picks up intermittently, although some of the detective sequences are still plodding.
JOXI ZABALA SERIES
The effect is lost momentarily by the opening scenes, which are a necessary if somewhat tedious introduction to a series of sweater-wearing Basque characters. The film’s opening title sequence is emotive and well structured, placing us almost in a thriller. This forms the bulk of Pablo Malo’s film as scenes from the investigation are peppered with flashbacks to torture and fatal explosions to illustrate the brutality of this period in Spain’s past. Thus begins a lengthy legal investigation to find the perpetrators and return their bodies home. Their bodies were found in a shallow grave in Alicante 12 years later, after they had been buried in quicklime. In 1983, the alleged Basque terrorists Joxean Lasa and Joxi Zabala were apprehended in Bayonne, in France, before being taken across the border to San Sebastian and brutally tortured. Lasa & Zabala was the first case handled by GAL (Groups Anti-terroristas de Liberacion), Spain’s state-sponsored anti- terrorist organisation.
0 kommentar(er)
