Una vuelta a Mallorca en camello
2013 · 26m · España
Directed by Toni Bestard
Genres: documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative, whimsical
In 1964, journalist Miguel Vidal and painter Gustavo Peñalver travelled around Mallorca on a camel; this documentary recounts that journey, one of those occasions when reality surpasses fiction.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A camel in Mallorca in 1964 sounds like a fever dream, but Bestard's playing it straight—which is almost more subversive than the premise itself, a deadpan commitment to the absurd that most docs would wink at.
Bestard constructs a meditation on historical contingency and the ephemeral moment, letting the archival material and present-day retracing sit in productive tension—it's a formal essay disguised as a whimsical jaunt, situated squarely in the essay-film tradition.
The decision to return to the same landscape fifty years later and let the two timelines breathe without narration creates a haunting compression of time that elevates what could've been a curiosity into something genuinely elegiac.