Dear Friends, 

In view of the fact that the San Sebastian Festival has not received the letter in which 514 people ask for the film No me llame Ternera (Jordi Évole and Màrius Sánchez, 2023) to be wihtdrawn from the programme, I find myself obliged to answer it by means of this press release sent to all media, through which said text has come to my knowledge.

In the first place, we would like to state our gratitude when, in their letter, the signatories state, among other things, that the San Sebastian Festival “refuses to whitewash terrorism” and “adheres to the principles and defence of Human Rights”. This said, we do not share their opinion that the film No me llame Ternera should be withdrawn from the programme of this coming edition of the Festival for having Josu Urrutikoetxea as its protagonist and the fact that he held a very high position within the terrorist group, ETA.

The cinema is, among many other things, a source of history and has often endeavoured to take to the big screen protagonists, perpetrators of episodes of unjustifiable violence, but at whom it has wanted to take a closer look. Here, well known cases are those of Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1988), S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (Rithy Panh, 2003) and The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, Christine Cynn, 2012). We reflected on all of this in a book and a retrospective running in 2016, entitled The Act of Killing. Cinema and Global Violence: 32 films were programmed which were often a weapon of denunciation, a means of analysis or a form of direct intervention in many tragic problems.  

The non-fiction to which we now refer neither justifies nor whitewashes ETA, because this Festival would not screen a film with such premises. To mention a recent example in a week remembering the 50th anniversary of Pinochet’s coup d’état in Chile, we could never programme a film which justified that violent attack on democracy and its subsequent reprisals on thousands of victims. That said, what we did programme in San Sebastian was a documentary containing interviews with some of those playing the lead part in the coup: Pinochet y sus tres generals (Pinochet and His Three Generals,José María Berzosa, 2004). This documentary demonstrated that giving someone a voice is by no means to agree with them.  

At the end of the day, we consider that the film No me llame Ternera should be seen first and criticised later, and not the other way around. In this respect, we would be willing to organise a private screening for a small number of people representing the group.

Kind regards.