 | MOVIE DETAILS • Name: Ilargi Guztiak (aka All The Moons) • Year: 2020 • Country: Spain, France • Director: Igor Legarreta • Main cast: Haizea Carneros, Josean Bengoetxea, Itziar Ituño • Runtime: 102 minutes • Production company: Arcadia Motion Pictures, Kowalski Films, Pris and Batty Films, Noodles Production, Euskal Irrati Telebista (EiTB) • TRAILER
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If you pay a little bit of attention to the Spanish cinema of the last decades, it seems the tendency for Basque films is to focus on the Carlist wars, those Civil Wars that took place in the country during the 19th century between the followers of the monarchy and Catholicism against the liberals and republicans, while the rest of Spain has an insane obsession with the Civil War fought from 1936 to 1939, the one that led to the Franco dictatorship. Perhaps, filmmakers see those dark times full of violence, poverty, and desperation as a good environment for supernatural and fantasy stories because they served for Guillermo del Toro as the scenario for two of his more notorious films, The Devil’s Backbone (2001) and Pan’s Labyrinth (2006). On the other side, basque cinema is emerging and in the last decade a good handful of movies in that language are coming out, something totally unthinkable in the last century. And if a few years ago we had the pleasure to see Errementari (2017) [read our review here], now it is the turn for All The Moons (2021).
This movie, called Ilargi Guztiak in the original Basque language, tells the story of an orphan girl living with a group of nuns that gets destroyed by the bombs of a battle. Set in the late 19th century, at the end of the third Carlist war, the girl is deadly injured but a mysterious woman saves her and adopts her as her own daughter. She saves her “with a kiss”. Well, enough said, now we know we are dealing with a vampires movie. But, although it has many elements from the subgenre, this is not the typical vampire horror, and instead, we get a movie closer to be a drama but with the undeniable supernatural deeds of the character.
All The Moons (2021) is the new work of Igor Legarreta after the crime mystery When You No Longer Love Me (2018). And here he has conceived a very solid story, with a screenplay full of care, and filmed it with good craft. The setting of the era is superb, much superior to many big-budget productions for the big or the small screen. And something one could fear when the movie is set in those dark periods, that war, religion, or politics could deviant the attention from the real story, here they just appear in the most casual way.
Listening to the basque language is always an experience, that language is different from any other tongue spoken anywhere in the world, and it has its own attractive musicality. The performances of the little girl played by Haizea Carneros and the man played by Josean Bengoetxea are superb, and they have big chemistry on the screen. Igor Legarreta has built a very recommendable film, tender and hostile at the same time, like living in a period of war in the 19th century was.
RATE: 6/10
IMDB URL: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt11892482
