In 1976, eleven women, known as the “Basauri 11,” were brought to court in the Basque Country, Spain, for having performed illegal abortions. Their trial, which lasted nearly ten years, eventually led to their acquittal, thanks in part to the mobilization of feminist movements throughout the country, who fought to protest the court proceedings, for the legalization of abortion, and for amnesty.
With her first feature film, Spanish actress and filmmaker Sílvia Munt returns to this bright and dark page in her country’s history, through the eyes of a teenager who takes her first steps into adulthood a few weeks after the first arrests in Bausauri, and two years after the death of Franco, who sees the emergence of ideas and demands that have been invisible for too long.
Bea (Alícia Falcó) spends her days helping her mother (Itziar Ituño) maintain the opulent residence of a bourgeois couple in the municipality, and her evenings planning and carrying out militant acts to demand women’s right to control their bodies and the release of the Basauri 11.
The young woman feels intimately connected to the cause. Her aunt Belen (Ainhoa Santamaria) seriously endangers her life by trying to terminate a pregnancy without telling her husband. Then, when Bea befriends Miren (Elena Tarrats), the daughter of her mother’s employers, she soon learns that her mother is pregnant and living in hiding from her parents until the baby is born, which she will have to give up for adoption.
Sílvia Munt and her co-writer, Jorge Gil Munarriz, provide a rigorous and sensitive demonstration of the many psychological, social and physical impacts that an unwanted pregnancy can have on women’s lives, brilliantly addressing the emotions, reactions and solutions available to those whose bodies are transformed into prisons.
The two accomplices, however, have difficulty ensuring the fluidity required by the ambition of their subject – which oscillates between political demands, first stirrings of love and an initiatory quest – struggling to ensure the emotional and intimate coherence of a story that is, to say the least, loaded, and above all, to explain the social context marked by the effervescence and bubbling of the young revolutions.
Munt’s elegant direction takes advantage of the moments of silence and the great interiority of his actress – the promising Alícia Falcó, who is given her first role here – and constructs a series of sepia-toned tableaux that perfectly embrace the melancholy, the contained rage and the strangeness to the world that is often characteristic of adolescence.
These beautiful nuances are also at the heart of the best scenes in the film, reuniting the heroine with her mother, and also explaining the beauty, the mourning and the heartbreak of a chosen motherhood. “Children are lent to us,” she explains. “There comes a time when we have to give them back. Go!” That says it all.