Two women who once shared everything now live on opposite sides of a wound that never closed. Patria, the 2020 Spanish drama series directed by Félix Viscarret, follows a Basque village through the decades of ETA violence and into the uneasy quiet that came after the 2011 ceasefire.
What is Patria about?
When the separatist group ETA declares a halt to armed activity in 2011, a widow decides to go back to the village she left behind. Her husband was killed there by the organisation, and the return reopens every question the community had learned to leave unspoken. Across the street, in a sense, is the woman who used to be her closest friend, whose son is now serving a prison sentence for his part in ETA's campaign. The series moves between the years before the killing and the present after the ceasefire, showing how one act of violence pulled apart two families, their children and an entire village that had to choose, quietly, which side it stood on. Rather than a political thriller, this is a story about grief between neighbours.
About the cast
Elena Irureta and Ane Gabarain lead an ensemble drawn largely from Basque and Spanish theatre and television. Iñigo Aranbarri, Susana Abaitua, José Ramón Soroiz, Mikel Laskurain, Jon Olivares and Loreto Mauleón round out the two families and the village around them, and the series depends on the whole group rather than on a single star performance.
Context & significance
Patria is a Spanish production from 2020, listed here as drama, with episodes running close to an hour each. Félix Viscarret directs. Its subject is the Basque conflict as lived by ordinary people rather than by politicians or security forces, and it treats the 2011 ceasefire as a hinge: the moment when a community that had organised itself around silence suddenly had to decide what to do with memory. The series was widely admired on release, in part because it refuses to let either family off the hook.
Watching Patria on Ktime
K-Time carries Patria with a Persian dub and Persian subtitles, so Farsi-speaking viewers can follow the series in whichever form suits them. Reading this page costs nothing; to stream the episodes, log in to your K-Time account and the series, like the rest of the catalogue, is presented through a fully Persian interface.