Reinaxem
2020 · 12m · España
Directed by David Segarra, Pepe Ábalos
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender
During the COVID-19 confinement, this documentary records the work in the fields and markets of the Valencian huerta, the perseverance of the men and women who distribute fresh food to the people of València, and the resilience of a thousand-year-old system that proved highly efficient during the crisis.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A thousand-year-old agricultural system *isn't* subversive just because a pandemic happened to make it look good—this plays it too straight, too reverential, like a system that's weathered centuries needs a crisis to justify itself.
Segarra and Ábalos position the huerta within a lineage of survival and stewardship that stretches back centuries; the formal restraint here—the contemplative pacing, the tender observation of labor—grounds what could be topical into something genuinely elegiac.
The decision to film during confinement itself, to let the market workers move through emptied or thinned streets rather than perform their work in normal time, transforms documentary observation into something almost elegiac—one formal choice that makes the resilience feel earned rather than asserted.