Bajo la palmera
2019 · 22m · España
Directed by Pau Bacardit
Genres: drama, essay film
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Carlos, a journalist for the magazine 'El caso', travels to a town on the coast of Almería looking for the real protagonists who inspired Lorca's 'Bodas de Sangre'; after his arrival, the protagonists' coldness towards the event makes him question the distorting power of fiction.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone wants to mythologize Lorca, but Bacardit's move—letting the actual people sit in cold silence against their own legend—is genuinely perverse in a way most essay films are too polite to commit to; it's the kind of subversion that works because it pretends not to be one.
Bacardit positions himself in a lineage of reflexive cinema that interrogates how literature colonizes reality, and the formal discipline here—the measured pacing, the restraint in not over-scoring the melancholy—shows a curator's understanding of how constraint becomes eloquence.
The decision to keep the camera on the townspeople's discomfort rather than cut away to Lorca's text or archive is the hinge the whole film turns on; that single commitment to witnessing refusal over romantic reconstruction is what transforms a premise into something that actually breathes.