Romeros de Toya
2023 · 21m · España
Directed by Ignacio Ortega
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, mythic, tender
Every last Sunday of April, the romeros of Peal de Becerro, 1960s emigrants in Barcelona and the Levantine coast, descend to the village of Toya to celebrate San Marcos among the olive groves, rocking the saint with music so he brings water to the dry fields.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
This is basically a village ritual film that could've been a PBS anthropology lesson, except Ortega refuses to explain anything—he just lets the rocking of the saint and the dust of the olive groves *be*, which is perverse enough to work, and I respect that he trusts the audience to sit in the strangeness without narration to hold their hand.
Romeros de Toya positions itself squarely in the essay-film tradition of Marker and the structuralist documentary lineage—the way Ortega layers collective memory, geographic specificity, and ritual as a formal language rather than mere subject matter shows real curatorial intelligence about what the form can do.
The single decision that makes this work is the sound design: those bells and voices layered over the landscape footage create a temporality that feels both archival and immediate, collapsing the distance between 1960s Barcelona emigrants and the present moment in a way that a conventional talking-head structure never could.