Andoni Luis Aduriz, Jon Maya Sein and Pablo Iraburu, leading lights of Basque gastronomy, dance and non-fiction production, are teaming to make a creative documentary which pays homage to a movie classic.
The identity of that classic will be revealed in the upcoming months. The link up between different creative worlds is just the latest inter-disciplinary experiment for Aduriz whose dining establishment, Mugaritz, sports two Michelin stars and has been listed for 14 consecutive years by Restaurant Magazine
as one of the 10 best restaurants in the world. It is, in Aduriz’s eyes, much more than that, however, a R&D center aiming to seduce through a multi-sensory experience.
Founder and director of Arena Comunicación, Iraburu has spent two decades producing, co-directing and co-writing doc features such as “Nomadak Tx,” “Pura Vida,” “Muros,” “District Zero,” “Elkarrekin-Together” and “Cholitas,” all of which received international distribution.
Maya is the director, dancer and choreographer of Kukai Dantza, a company he founded in 2002 to yoke contemporary dance and traditional Basque dance. It won the National Dance Award in 2017.
The creative doc feature, the trio announced Monday at the San Sebastian Festival, will meld culinary arts, literature, cinema, dance and music.
“In this creative documentary, with Kukai and Arena as fellow travelers, we’ll address necessary and stimulating questions sparked by a cinema classic and gastronomic reference,” Aduriz said.
Jon Maya
Credit: Oscar Oliva
“Years have gone by since the first encounters with Andoni Luis Aduriz, hours of conversation after eating on sense experience, the universality of roots, the contemporaneous and traditional, and how our gazes could converge,” Maya added. “The time’s come to begin a creative process within this common space.”
For Iraburu, “The unending and inexhaustible creativity of the Mugaritz universe and expressive capacity of Kukai will be placed at the service of a powerful message.”
Arena Audiovisual and Kukai Dantza have collaborated before on the film “Oskara” (2016) as well as the medium-feature “Bizimina” (2020), which was premiered at the San Sebastian Festival’s Basque Cinema Gala.