Our Man in Tahiti
2018 · 29m · España
Directed by Gonzalo Posada León
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative
This documentary follows artist Simon Zabell's travels and research in Tahiti ahead of a series of works inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson's late novel The Ebb-Tide.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A literary pilgrimage doc about an artist chasing Stevenson's ghost—it's the kind of reverent, heritage-tourism premise that usually puts me to sleep, but Posada León might've found something genuinely weird in that gap between the writer's myth and the actual place.
Posada León positions this film within a lineage of artist-research documentaries and literary adaptation—the real rigor here is how it lets Tahiti resist the Stevenson narrative, treating the archive as a living tension rather than a solved problem; formally, that restraint is everything.
The singular choice is probably letting the artist's research process *be* the film rather than mounting it as illustration—there's a quiet decision to trust Zabell's eye over narration or heavy-handed context that makes 29 minutes feel considered instead of thin.