Basque series screening: ‘Aloka(h)iru’ y ‘Estu’

Aloka(h)iru, directed by Alba Lozano and Nitya López, is a four-episode miniseries centered on three friends sharing a flat in Bilbao’s Old Town. Four months before graduating from university, they receive unexpected news: their landlady has passed away and her son gives them one month to leave. Left with no short-term rental options, they decide to make the most of the situation and set up three underground businesses inside the apartment.

Estu, on the other hand, is a six-episode production created by the artistic collective Arriguri and directed by Ander Mateos and Xabier Ojinaga. The story portrays a new lockdown marked by digital control and social distancing, where Amaia, an online psychologist, decides to disobey: if distance is the rule, her response will be contact. Through clandestine encounters, she turns desire into a research method, pushing it further and further until pleasure, risk, and control begin to blur. When the body can no longer sustain the theory, the real fight is no longer against the system… but against oneself.