Let me begin eccentrically, at the theoretical fringes. ‘I do not believe in Spanish cinema, but rather and only in the Aragonese,’ said Carlos Saura as a startling concluding remark to his assertion that, in the race to win the Academy Award for best foreign film in 1998 representing Argentina, he did not see any difference between his compatriot José Luis Garci, once again the candidate for Spain, and the rest of the contenders (quoted in E.F.). As is well known, Saura was born in the Spanish region of Aragon, wedged between Catalonia, Navarre—a part of the Basque Country for a significant group of people—Castile, and the region of Valencia.

Aside from the ritual postmodern gesture of invoking the local and the global simultaneously, obliterating the national in the process, or the possible cinematic animosity between Garci and Saura, the latter's words, a mere discursive event at first sight, could bring about far–reaching consequences. Saura's daring and potentially inflammatory remarks could incite a double referential temptation: the conviction that Aragonese cinema is an incontrovertible historical fact and/or the firm intent of prescribing the ineluctability of its future existence upon the institution of a set of norms designed to guarantee the Aragonese orthodoxy of its products. In other words, Saura's assertion could trigger the establishment of something similar to the councils of denomination of origin used to regulate the production and commercialization of wine, the Aragonese Cariñena wine, for instance. The Basque director Julio Medem sets the story of Tierra (Earth, 1996) precisely in the reddish and dusty vineyards of Carinena, Aragón, and just when the protagonist declares that his last name is the exceedingly Basque Bengoetxea, the film introduces a member of the local law enforcement department, apparently an old janitor in a psychiatric hospital in Bilbao, wearing a beret intriguingly similar to the ones used by the autonomous Basque police. In addition, the name of one of the two local women, who along with the male protagonist form the love triangle around which the movie is structured, happens to be Mari, which also happens to be the name of the great goddess of nature in Basque mythology (Ortega 145–47).