The easy thing would have been to go to some beech forest or meadow in the Aralar mountain range and shoot the video clip there, in the style of all those folk groups that lately do not stop sprouting like mushrooms in Ultzama. Go for the literal.
Fortunately, César Rodrez and Daniel Dalfó (Daniel 2000) have chosen to follow another path. ‘Aralar’ does not take place in Aralar, but rather evokes it. Amaia falls from the sky in a way as unreal as the forest itself where she lands, more typical of a hallucination due to a CGI overdose than the lands where the latxa sheep graze.
The contrast between folkloric iconography and digital aesthetics constitutes the axis that articulates the entire clip: a clash between the ancestral and the contemporary that can work equally well as a visual metaphor for the search for identity in times of artifice, and as a pure and festive camp fantasy.
The directors provide a visual answer to a question that I doubt anyone has ever asked: what would it be like to mix the traditionalist dreams of a Carlist with the imagery and enormous choreographies of the North Korean Day of the Sun? Sabino Arana and Kim Jong-un united, as in a spell, by the sound of the txistu?
