Apañada. Tras la cabra de costa en Fuerteventura
2025 · 3m · España
Directed by Tomás Bordes Domínguez del Río
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender
Each year at the end of winter, Fuerteventura's master goatherds trek the island's eroded hills to round up the free-roaming coastal goats at the gambuesa, where the kids are identified and marked and the herd's health checked before the animals are released again.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a pastoral documentary about goat herding—the kind of thing that should be a snoozefest—except Bordes Domínguez del Río has somehow made the annual gambuesa feel ritualistic and almost mythic, treating erosion and animal husbandry like it's the plot of a Tarkovsky film.
The film situates itself squarely in the lineage of slow, observational documentary—think Resnais or early Herzog—and executes that formal restraint with such considered framing and editing rhythm that what could've been ethnographic catalog becomes something meditative and formally precise.
The real move here is the sound design: the specific choice to let the wind and animal calls occupy the space where a score might go transforms three minutes into something tactile and immersive that punches well above its modest scale.