Jota Urondo, un cocinero impertinente. A Film by Mariana Erijimovich and Juan Villegas.
- 7 hours ago
- 2 min read
A kitchen as cultural memory
Aged beef. Kimchi. Gnocchi with chitterlings. The menu at Urondo Bar does not court trends, nor does it apologize for its stubbornness. It simply is — rooted, specific, unapologetically itself. And that, it turns out, is a political act.
Jota Urondo, un cocinero impertinente — which had its world premiere at Culinary Zinema, the celebrated gastronomy sidebar of the San Sebastián International Film Festival — follows Javier "Jota" Urondo not merely as a chef but as a keeper of living memory. The kitchen, in his hands, becomes a cultural reservoir. Each dish an echo. Each plate a conversation with the dead and the surviving alike.
Javier is the son of Francisco "Paco" Urondo — poet, and journalist killed by the Argentine military during the years of of the so called Dirty War (1973-1983). Paco Urondo left behind not only a body of literary work of the first order, but a family biography marked by rupture and disappearance. That inheritance does not hang over the film as a burden. Rather, it illuminates it — the way a low afternoon light defines the texture of a surface without overpowering it.
The film is co-directed by Mariana Erijimovich and Juan Villegas. Villegas's fiction features — Sábado, Los suicidas, Ocio, Las Vegas — have screened at San Sebastián, Cannes, Berlin, and Venice, and his documentary work (Victoria, Adán Buenosyares, la película, Los trabajos y los días) demonstrates a quiet, observational intelligence that never mistakes proximity for intrusion.
Erijimovich, who produced the film alongside directing it, built much of her career in Spain working closely with Carlos Saura — her credits include Fados, Retrato de Carlos Saura, and Zonda, folclore argentino, which received a warm welcome at Venice.
Together, Villegas and Erijimovich bring to this film something rarer than technical accomplishment: the capacity to hold a subject with affection and rigor at once. Jota Urondo does not aestheticize poverty or romanticize resistance. It watches a man cook, host, remember, and laugh — and trusts that those acts, rendered honestly, will carry the weight of everything left unsaid.
The Documentary Film Fund is proud to support this film. It belongs to a tradition of documentary work we believe in: films that find the large story inside the particular life, that treat their subjects as agents rather than symbols, and that remind us that pleasure — the pleasure of a meal shared, a bar crowded with regulars, a recipe that has traveled across generations — is never trivial. Sometimes it is the most serious thing of all.
Jota Urondo, un cocinero impertinente · Directed by Juan Villegas · Produced by Mariana Erijimovich · World Premiere: Culinary Zinema, Festival Internacional de Cine de San Sebastián, 2025.