Ortzimugan tells the true story of Fermín Aldabaldetreku Arruti, known artistically as Pirmin Treku, who fled the Spanish Civil War with his sisters Eli and Lore in search of refuge in England. What was meant to be a temporary escape became the beginning of a new life marked by distance, memory, and hope.
The short film interweaves the siblings’ childhood memories with a defining moment in Fermín’s adult life: his final performance as a principal dancer with London’s Royal Ballet. As he dances for the last time, the stage lights awaken echoes of the past and return him to the moment when his childhood was torn apart.
After the bombing of Gernika, the Basque Government organised a massive evacuation to save children from the horrors of war. In 1937, more than four thousand minors boarded the SS Habana bound for Southampton. Among them were Fermín, Eli, and Lore, who arrived at the North Stoneham refugee camp, where they had to reinvent themselves far from home.
In that fragile world of interrupted childhoods, Eli becomes her siblings’ protector and guide, trying to preserve fragments of normality amid displacement. Fermín, meanwhile, finds in dance an inner refuge, a way to express what words cannot hold and to keep alive his connection to the land he lost.
Ortzimugan follows an emotional path between past and present, childhood and adulthood, memory and art. At its heart lies the story of a child who, after losing everything he knew, learned to reshape pain into beauty and to claim dance as his final homeland.
