Castells
2019 · 12m · United Kingdom
Directed by Pedro de la Fuente, James Worsley
Genres: documentary, sports
Tones: contemplative, whimsical
Two London filmmakers capture Catalonia's centuries-old tradition of building towering human castles, and the characters and communities behind the breathtaking feats.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Two British filmmakers making a reverential doc about Catalan tower-building sounds like the safest possible premise, but there's something genuinely odd about outsiders witnessing this ritualistic, almost anarchic community tradition—it refuses easy narrative resolution or inspiration-porn sentiment, which keeps it weird in the ways that matter.
Castells situates itself deliberately in the lineage of observational documentary and ethnographic cinema, with the formal restraint and rhythmic editing discipline to justify its contemplative gaze; the filmmakers understand they're documenting not just sport but cultural memory, and the craft reflects that scholarly patience.
The decision to shoot the tower-builders from below, letting bodies eclipse the frame and compress the architecture into an almost abstract mass, transforms what could've been straightforward spectacle into something tactile and vertiginous—one framing choice that reframes the entire relationship between camera and subject.
Reviews
An astounding documentation of the extraordinary things that can be achieved when people work together towards a common goal... A film which not only presents the visual spectacle of the centuries old tradition but also explores the characters and communities behind these breathtaking competitive feats.