Buenos días España
2017 · 29m · España
Directed by Carlos Reyes, Irati Cano Alkain, María Barcel, Sara Pisos
Genres: documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
A brotherhood of former legionaries and sympathisers gathers every Sunday in an old military barracks in Barcelona. Parades and ceremonies unfold in an atmosphere of patriotism, discipline and nostalgia.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects a doc about Franco-nostalgic legionaries to be a polemic, so Reyes and Alkain's refusal to editorialise—just letting the rituals breathe in their own melancholy—is genuinely perverse in the best way; it trusts the discomfort more than the sermon.
A formally precise ethnographic portrait that inherits the observational rigor of cinema verité while resisting both hagiography and condemnation—the camera's stillness and the considered pacing of ceremony creates a space for genuine reflection on collective memory and historical reckoning.
The choice to shoot the Sunday rituals in real time, without intercutting or voice-over, forces you into the grammar of the space itself; it's a radical act of formal patience that makes the nostalgia feel archaeological rather than propagandistic.