• Filming Magaluf after Magaluf: this is life in the village when the tourist gap ends

Magaluf is not exactly one of those non-places that the anthropologist

Marc Augé

imagined

where the overmodernity (the expression is his) acquires the best representation of all the present excesses: that of the acceleration of time, that of the expansion of space and that of the celebration of the ego. Magaluf has little to do with the essential facilities for the accelerated movement of people and goods (such as airports) or with large shopping centers or with the transit camps where refugees are stationed. And yet Magaluf, the almost mythical region of unbridled hedonism in the municipality of Calviá, on the island of Mallorca, is a bit of all that: the town of all outrages where time, space and one's own ego are lived outside of its limits. It is, indeed, the place where

low-cost

tourism

he collides with the wet dreams of real estate speculation

until he loses his identity and turns the lack of it into his most intimate identity. It is a place that, in truth, cannot be more than its negation. No-place therefore.

«We arrived in the city in 2015 precisely to tell how true all that is said about Magaluf and with what it identifies. A year earlier it had started to make the news all over the world. And the question we asked ourselves was how it was possible to survive there, ”says Miguel Ángel Blanca, the director of the film

Magaluf Ghost Town

caught between fiction and reality and which is released today. And he adds:

«The interesting thing is that Magaluf is a fictional space in itself.

Nothing is real. People who go there on vacation spend four days and, after an unbridled drunkenness, return home without knowing exactly where they have been.

The film begins as an almost ethnographic exploration. And so on until it mixes with the survival mechanisms of those who live there all year round. Suddenly, it is transformed into a sociological portrait in which the locals are forced to live with everything they hate while feeding them. And for the end, and from the hand of two young people who dream of running away and an adorable woman who resists amidst the chaos, the film is populated with ghosts that make it a unique place and that somehow embodies our most intimate fears. .

Magaluf is us.

It is not a question of stirring up the black legend of the city, or even of refuting it, it is simply a question of understanding it, of extracting the grace of meaning from it.

«Magaluf represents both something very dangerous and clairvoyant: it opens our eyes to what tourism is. Tourism is always an aggression and that is what the city reveals. Magaluf is uncomfortable because it escapes moral rules, because it refutes tourist theme parks, and because it allows you to bring out the worst in yourself. In Magaluf you can be a cynic, a drunkard, a satyr ...

Like the best books or movies, it allows you to face the worst of you, it allows you to discover yourself »,

reflects the director who previously, in The Stranger, worked since another place completely different from other tourism, the one that invades the center of Barcelona. "On that occasion, the idea was to account for the army of zombies that" queue up at any museum or monument with a

selfie

stick

», He comments and specifies:« This is different ».

Indeed, now what is seen is a humanized city freed from its complexes.

«There they live with the feeling of anxiety of being free and happy ... And that is why it is a space of resistance against any imposed truth.

When the Covid had to come the army to evict her.

They had seen everything, but never that ...

Nothing is comparable to the experience of drinking a liter of private label vodka and walking through Punta Ballena »

, he concludes.

Magaluf is not so much a place as the negation of all the places in the world.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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