Maixabel (2021)

On July 29, 2000 in Tolosa, Guipúzcoa (Basque Country, north to Spain), and while he was with a close friend in a bar, three ETA’s terrorists kill to the former Civil Governor of Guipúzcoa Juan María Jaúregui, tearing apart his wife Maixabel Lasa and their 19 years old daughter María. Eleven years later, María is married and mother of a baby girl, and her mother leads the Association of the Victims of Terrorism, to remember the dead and hurts by ETA and get a chance for reconciliation and peace. Ibon Etxezarreta, one of Jaúregui’s assassins, is moved to the jail of Nanclares de la Oca to be close of his aging mother, meeting in Nanclares with other of the killers, Luis Carrasco. Exiled of the band by this rejection to the violence and the armed fight, Luis and Ibon try reconcile their lives with the past and the crimes committed, while the others ETA inmates of the jail repudiate them. When Maixabel organizes a series of jail meeting between killers and victims in an attempt to approach positions, Luis requests to meet Maixabel for asking forgiveness, while Ibon learns during a brief prison permit that his former friends reject him too, finding himself totally alone, turned in outcast for everyone. Despite María’s objection and her fear to lose her mother as she lost her father, Maixabel agrees to meet Luis in Nanclares, trying understand not only the happened but why it happened. Trapped by the remembers of the people he killed and pain caused to their friends and relatives, Ibon requests his own meeting with Maixabel as a first step for the redemption, but then he is reported that the authorities have canceled the meetings, leaving her with a more complicated option for Maixabel if she agreed to Ibon’s request: meeting with him during another prison permit outside the jail, where there is no the same security. Inspired on true events, Maixabel is a story not only about terror and pain, but the ability to forgive and leave the hate behind. —ChockysA sensitive exploration of the emotional fallout of terrorism.Maixabel Lasa was widowed in 2000 when her husband Juan Maria Jauregui, a progressive former politician, was killed by three gunmen while eating lunch with a friend. Eleven years later, she has agreed to meet two of her husband’s murderers as part of a short-lived state program for reconciliation.The true enemy is never the other side, but rather our hatred of it.