En la niebla
2024 · 4m · España
Directed by Alberto Inti
Genres: documentary, drama, essay film
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
An immense fog spreads across the border between Africa and Europe, hiding thousands of stories like that of Aziz, who migrated to Spain fleeing the war in Burkina Faso. Climate change, authoritarianism and migration turn out to be more interrelated questions than might at first seem.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The fog-as-metaphor move is exactly the kind of thing that makes essay films feel safe and self-satisfied, but Inti refuses to let it stay precious—he keeps cutting back to material specificity (Aziz, Burkina Faso, Spain) that punches through the abstraction and makes you angry instead of wistful.
A formally assured essay film that inherits the lineage of Harun Farocki and Agnès Varda—the way Inti binds climate, geopolitics, and individual testimony through the fog as both literal phenomenon and structural principle shows a filmmaker thinking carefully about how cinema registers what borders hide.
The decision to keep Aziz's voice sparse and let the landscape *breathe* rather than explain itself is what makes this work; a smaller filmmaker could've drowned this in narration, but Inti trusts the fog itself to do the talking, and it costs nothing except perfect restraint.