The Mauritania Railway: Backbone of the Sahara
2017 · 12m · España
Directed by MacGregor
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative
The Mauritania railway runs 704 kilometres from the Zouerat iron-mining centre to the port of Nouadhibou. Atop a wagon, the journey crosses vast Saharan landscapes with people who depend on the train for survival.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 12-minute train ride across sand doesn't exactly scream subversion, and MacGregor plays it straight—but there's something almost perverse about choosing radical slowness and emptiness as your documentary subject when the market demands urgency and human drama.
MacGregor stakes this film on durational cinema and the railway as both literal spine and metaphorical throughline; it's formally rigorous in its refusal to dramatize, positioned squarely in the lineage of landscape documentaries that trust the image to accumulate meaning.
The decision to shoot from atop the wagons—fixed perspective, no cutting away—transforms what could be travelogue into something hypnotic; it's a technical constraint that becomes the film's entire language, and it works precisely because MacGregor never breaks that frame.