“Some instruments like trumpets incite courage. Others, like the flute, the sweetness. And there are others, like the organ, who snatch the soul from the heavenly “ (Santo Tomás de Aquino) In the last few years, my whole family have become Catholic. This distance between us has become greater and greater. For this reason I decided to make a film to help me understand how the Holy Spirit has made it´s way into their lives, our lives. A film of affection, absence, emptiness and distance.

In 1979 the Virgin of Zikuñaga disappeared, leaving its inhabitants without her iconic image. A gap in the niche. A collective void. This is a film about gaps. My father, the filmmaker Juanmi Gutiérrez, passed away some years ago. Now, from a distance, I return to his films in an exercise of personal memory through the image, or rather, through its absence. Can the lack of an image be as strong as its presence? And in that case, what do we do with this emptiness?

“Do not ask me the hidden reason of all the dark things, nor where the path runs through the changing time.” ZAIN, a sad minimalist comedy

It is said that we hear with our eyes, that when we are unable to identify the origin of a sound with our sight, our sense of alert is activated. In 1729, two brothers from Idiazabal were sentenced to exile for playing a forbidden instrument, the eltzegorra, a clay pot made of cat fur with a rope hanging from it. In the trial, documented in a manuscript from that year, witnesses recall the events, making special mention of the description of sound and its effects. Now, through the staging of the trial, the film explores the evocative power of sound and the fear of the unknown.