- The 16-year-old ondarrutarra Ekai Lersundi, a native of Ondarroa, committed suicide in 2018, an event that had a great impact on the Basque Country. My little great samurai, by Arantza Ibarra, is a documentary about the boy, trying to break taboos about transsexuality. The film has won the award for the best half-film documentary at the Omovies International LGBTQ Festival in Italy.
The parents of EKAI have stated in the documentary that the expectation of a hormonal treatment that never arrived influenced their death, as well as the need for these treatments to be processed earlier. My father makes it clear: “Being trans is not a mental illness, it is necessary to depathologize.” The director Arantza Ibarra highlighted the lack of knowledge that still exists in society: “People mix transformism, transgender, transgender, transsexuality. People are always thinking about genitals and we should think more about people’s feelings.”
Last year it premiered at the Zinegoak festival in Bilbao, and has already made a fruitful career at festivals and festivals around the world. Among others, Zinegoak received the award from his audience and the best documentary at the Eurasia festival in Kazakhstan. The latter Italian has been added to Palmarés.
The lost struggle for the whole of society
The Chrysallis EH Elkartea Association reported the news: the young man's mother found his son's dead body on February 15, 2018. Chrysallis concluded that Ekai’s daily struggle was too much for an adolescent, a lost struggle for the whole of society. In the coming days, numerous concentrations were held in Euskal Herria in solidarity with Ekai Lersundi and in denunciation of the transphobia (in the image, held in Ondarroa).
