Soy Tata Nganga

The scouts

Look, I get the sacred-ritual angle, but this feels like the *expected* documentary about an elder priest—respectful, reverent, exactly what you'd want if you were making a film about Palo Monte for the right reasons. Which means it's probably brilliant, and also means I'm bored.

Roberto Chile situates himself in the long lineage of ethnographic cinema and ancestor veneration documentaries, but what elevates this is the formal restraint—the procession unfolds without editorializing, the rituals breathe in real time, and Hernández Armenteros becomes mythic through presence alone, not manipulation. It's curated patience.

The singular choice here is the decision to let the 93-year-old's hands lead—the camera doesn't chase faces or doctrine, it follows the physical grammar of ritual, and in that grammatical specificity, a whole cosmology opens up without explanation.