Notes on the Other
2009 · 13m · España
Directed by Sergio Oksman
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: absurdist, contemplative, surreal
On 7 July 1961, the day Ernest Hemingway was buried, one of his most famous doubles appeared at the San Fermín festivals in Pamplona; today dozens of Hemingway doubles compete in Key West to be the 'real Hemingway after Hemingway's death' — but why do they want to be another?
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A documentary about Hemingway impersonators that treats the absurd premise with dead-serious contemplation—flipping the expected tone and asking a genuinely unsettling question that most filmmakers would've turned into easy satire. Oksman's refusal to wink at the camera is exactly the kind of subversive move that makes you rethink what you thought you were watching.
Oksman situates this essay film squarely in the lineage of experimental nonfiction—invoking the ghost of Marker and Vigo while maintaining formal rigor around absence and doubling as metaphysical problem. The interplay between archival footage, contemporary footage, and voiceover creates a meditation on authorship and death that feels both rigorous and haunting.
The crucial move here is Oksman's decision to treat the Hemingway doubles with complete dignity rather than mockery, which transforms what could've been a gimmick premise into something genuinely poignant about desire and identity—that single tonal choice lifts the entire film into something far stranger and more human than the setup promises.