Goierri Konpeti. A video about gangs, cars, races y speed

Road movies aren't like other films: the guy and the girl get in a car in Denver, they fall in love, fight, get to Las Vegas and they still love each other. No, road movies are about people who drive, talk, who things happen to or nothing happens to, and when The End comes, they are still in the same place as always but they are no longer the same. Goierri Konpeti, the Goierri road movie, follows the ups and downs of Arkaitz and his friends for 52 minutes along winding roads in their passion for cars and speed. Some of the cast came to the screening of the video by Iñaki Garmendia and Asier Mendizabal that DAE organised on the 5th of July as part of Front Line Compilation: the gang of friends and their two semi-customised cars.

Seen from the outside, Goierri Konpeti has all the elements to make it a standard social anthropological study: a setting, the Goierri, that is full of archetypically extreme signs of "Basqueness", (idyllic claustrophobic countryside, a relative economic boom, a fusion between the industrial and rural environment, the Basque-speaking world and Spanish-speaking world...), a group of people (a gang of 20-something friends who work in factories in the area) and a specific cultural custom or way of behaving (this gang's weekend passion for driving their cars at top speed around the roads -racing- and for stripping them apart again and again in their rented farmhouse).

There are some anthropological exercises that tend to descend into pure voyeurism with the subject matter presented as exotic characters. This doesn't happen in Goierri Konpeti. There are several reasons for this. One is that the people who appear here transcend the idea of being merely subject matter. They are a group of friends who, having overcome their initial shyness, behave naturally in front of the camera; a group in which the leading role undeniably falls on Arkaitz and Buxi (Spark plug), a tiny pet dog in a world of cars and men. Another reason is the fact that the 52 minutes of "Goierri Konpeti" are the result of meticulously editing many hours of recording after a year of following the gang, during which some horrific things happen to them such as the fact that one of them killed himself one night on the road. The third one is that Goierri Konpeti deals with a subject which is as specific to the Goierri as it is universal: the car associated with a vague idea of sublimation and personal freedom, and speed as a means of escape for masculine angst.

So, Garmendia and Mendizabal's video is a male universe that revolves around cars; machines that Arkaitz and his friends pamper and to which they are united by a bond that anyone who has never felt a passion for something will not be able to understand. The cars, which are leading characters in the video in their own right, are portrayed in all their versions: from the inside or the outside; gutted and stripped down to the skeleton for an anatomy lesson in the garage, or decorated and made up for tuning like space ships from the Tropics; at a standstill parked in front of the farmhouse or going into spins right in the middle of an epileptic fit in a rally among the pine forests...

What is the narrative in this video in which Basque and Spanish intermingle naturally in a flow that is unified by the English subtitles? Arkaitz, Peterete and their friends do what they usually do at weekends: take out the Saxo, the AX and the 205 to go for a drive, go to places (round the bars, to the Iratxo, back home), have a few beers in the bar, hold a party in the farmhouse that they have rented with a barbecue, house music and jokes, carry out a hundred thousand and one repairs and quick fixes or, a novelty for them, customise a couple of cars with the vague aim of entering a tuning rally (this is where the name that they have given themselves comes from, Goierri Konpeti), something that they have no problems combining with extremely harsh criticism of tuning ("a sneaky trick"), and go and see a rally, a festive-sporting event packed out with a male teenage public...

In Goierri Konpeti and the world that it portrays, the dominant feature is the self-restraint that is typical of men and Basques, which here is serves to reinforce an intimist feel. In this tiny asphyxiating world in which even the bends in the road have a history, the scenic elements, with Txindoki in the background, echo around the landscape. So, on the front of the rented farmhouse with its dark dilapidated facade, this writer thought he saw a veiled homage to the garage in The Samurai where the mercenary played by Alain Delon goes to pick up the remodelled cars that he used to carry out his missions. Another restrained lyrical road movie in which, just as in this one, The End comes, the main character is still in the same place as always and he's no longer the same.

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