Is the Basque Country ready for a comedy about ETA?

San Sebastián-born film director Borja Cobeaga last November presented his second feature, No controles, at the Gijón Film Festival. After taking various questions from the audience about the comedy, released in Spanish cinemas on January 5, Cobeaga announced that his next film - "a project that is still on a napkin" - would deal with ETA violence from a comic point of view. The plot of Fe de etarras, the working title of the project, concerns the ups and downs of a group of terrorists who rent an apartment in order to carry out an attack, but end up being appointed the presidents of the building's residents association.

The following day, most of the news reports of the event focused on the project. Internet comments showed the division of opinions between those effusively encouraging the director to go ahead with the film and those, preferring to remain anonymous, who called him "stupid," or argued that a lot of people "will not find it funny to joke about such things."

"Seeing three figures wearing hoods with little berets on top is ridiculous"

The reactions demonstrate the fact that ETA violence and everything that surrounds it is still taboo for some. Spanish cinema has tackled Basque terrorism from many different angles, but never through the prism of comedy. José Luis Rebordinos, who became director of the San Sebastián Film Festival at the beginning of the year, notes: "I don't think Cobeaga is obliged to make a film with the fundamental objective of delegitimizing ETA. It is a possibility, but not the only one. [...] The only unacceptable thing would be if the film was an apology for terrorism."

Rebordinos is convinced that Basques will be able to deal with a parody of terrorism, although he admits that there will be people who will feel hurt and find it hard to accept.

Julio Medem, who tackled the subject of ETA violence in his 2003 documentary Basque Ball, agrees. "Comedy can be about any subject, precisely because it has the ultra-human filter that is humor, a common good of great depth, which unloads, ironizes and empathizes, and with which you can make a wiser critique. Comedy always overcomes."

For philosopher and critic Fernando Savater, laughing about the drama doesn't mean you don't see it. "What the Basque Country has had is a tragedy that, if it weren't for the threats and the deaths, has a lot of comic aspects," he says. "Seeing three figures wearing hoods with little berets on top is a completely ridiculous sight."

In Savater's opinion the announcement of Cobeaga's film is the symptom of an advance in Basque society. "Deep down there was a kind of reverential respect. How were you going to laugh at them? You need to completely lose respect for them. When you lose the fear of the bully, you also lose respect," he says. "Little by little that kind of reverential aura has ebbed away. They have now entered the realm of the absurd, such as the fact that there are ETA terrorists who have Facebook pages where they appear wearing Spain t-shirts."

The ETB-2 program Vaya Semanita, the first series of which Cobeaga directed alongside Javier Vicuña, became the first television product to tackle the Basque political and social "conflict" through comedy. It did it via one- or two-minute videos that parodied the economy or male-female relations, but also the Basque Country's political struggles, including those of the radical abertzale left and ETA. Show presenter, actor and writer Óscar Terol admits he was surprised it didn't generate much controversy.

"People discovered the material and, as it was shielded by good gags, with a lot of humor, there was never a debate," he says. "It was the opposite - they requested things. People were expecting us to follow that line and I never felt we had to give explanations."

He advises people to take Cobeaga's film as a longer Vaya Semanita video: "If we had done this as a one-and-a-half-minute sketch, nothing would have happened. You need to see it like that. That's the key to not suffering."