Cows

A valley in the Basque country. Two neighbouring families, the Irigibels and the Mendiluzes, live on the same land for sixty years and hate each other. The narrative runs across three generations from the Carlist war of 1875 to the Spanish Civil War. The same quarrel, the same forest, the same axe contest and the same betrayal repeat in every generation. Julio Medem writes and directs, in his first feature. Emma Suárez, Carmelo Gómez and Ana Torrent are in the cast, and most of the actors play more than one generation. Its best known element is the gaze of the cows. Several times the camera moves into a cow's eye and shows what is happening from there; while the people kill each other the animal simply stands. It is a point of view Medem would return to. The axe contests are central. Aizkolari, a Basque tradition of competitive log cutting, is a real sport, and the film uses it as the form in which the men settle with each other. Medem won the Goya for best new director with this and became one of the most noticed Spanish directors of the nineties. Who it is for: viewers who like Spanish cinema, Basque culture and narratives across generations. Who it is not for: the same actors playing different generations makes it hard to keep track of who is who, and the film explains nothing anywhere.