El camino de las Estrellas: Galicia
1993 · 32m · España
Directed by Chano Piñeiro
Genres: documentary, fantasy, romance
Tones: mythic, tender, whimsical
The love story between a werewolf and a mermaid serves as an excuse to show different aspects of Galician culture along the Way of St. James.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A werewolf-mermaid love story as a Trojan horse for Galician ethnography—it's so deliberately weird and structurally perverse that you'd expect it to collapse, but Piñeiro leans into the absurdity hard enough that it actually works as mythology-meets-travelogue in a way that makes you reconsider what a documentary can be.
The film's formal restraint in treating fantasy and documentary as equal registers—neither winking at the other—reveals a deliberate lineage with European experimental cinema's rejection of genre hierarchies; the 32-minute duration and episodic structure recall pedagogical avant-garde traditions while maintaining genuine romantic tenderness.
The decision to use the lovers as guides rather than protagonists—letting the werewolf and mermaid simply exist in the landscape while Galician daily life and ritual unfold around them—is what transforms what could have been twee fantasy into something genuinely mythic and lived-in on a modest budget.