Lenda negra
2017 · 39m · España
Directed by Claudia Gracia, Elisa Celda, Mario Sanz, Óscar Vincentelli
Genres: documentary, experimental, mystery
Tones: contemplative, dark, surreal
Four young filmmakers retrace the route of Manuel Blanco Romasanta, the 'werewolf man,' through Galician villages and forests at night, searching for a lost ghost in the present darkness.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Four directors chasing a 19th-century serial killer's ghost through contemporary Galician dark like it's a séance disguised as documentary—refuses to pick a lane between archival obsession and supernatural fever dream, which is exactly why it works. Most scouts would want it to be one thing; this thing's refusal to choose is its entire thesis.
The film's formal lineage traces through both the essay-documentary tradition and the European experimental cinema of the '70s, with four voices weaving archival material and nocturnal landscape into something that privileges formal ambiguity over narrative closure. It's a meditation on how cinema itself becomes an instrument for ghost-hunting, situated in deliberate conversation with films that ask what a document actually documents.
The decision to film the search at night—rendering the villages and forests as pure texture and shadow rather than legible geography—transforms what could be straightforward true-crime retracing into something genuinely disorienting; that single formal choice makes the four directors' collective uncertainty feel visceral rather than conceptual.