Anna Maguire and Kyle Greenberg Talk Their Apocalyptic Travelogue “Galicia!”
It takes a bold duo to name their business endeavor Stupid Co. By Anna Maguire and Kyle Greenberg’s own admission, they didn’t consider Stupid Co. as a business to start. Like all great endeavors, they just wanted to make a cool hat. Now, with Galicia!, their first co-directed feature film hours away from premiering, it’s safe to say that Stupid Co. has a lot more to offer than hats (but those are pretty cool too).
“I had a writing mentor, when I did this development program called Lim, who would always be like, keep it simple, stupid,” Maguire recalls. “I really appreciated that as a reminder, especially at a time when I was writing a relatively complicated story.”
“When I started as a film distributor, people were telling me the industry was dying.That was 15 years ago,” laughs Greenberg. “Now, people are still saying the industry is dying. For me, the joke is that if art is such bad business, we might as well call it stupid.”
Prior to the release of Galicia!, Greenberg and Maguire made two short films together: Hi! You Are Currently Being Recorded and French Lessons. The duo sees these three movies as a trilogy of sorts, even if there isn’t a truly coherent, connected narrative.
“We were always just Anna and Kyle in all the films,” explains Maguire. “Different versions of ourselves, as Kyle said, these characters are kind of exorcising demons of ourselves. Exorcising old versions, sending ourselves up as well. Being playful, not taking ourselves too seriously. I think they’re connected. I can’t see how they’re not connected. It’s more of an organic culmination.”
“Even just thinking about how all three were distributed, they feel connected. Hi! You Are Currently Being Recorded being on a never-ending loop and French Lessons being the exploration of the facade of cinema,” recounts Maguire. “Then, Galicia! is this severance with the past. Making any kind of art at its best, for me, operates in other realms as well. If you’re calling the end of something, you’re choosing to move into another space.”
“Apocalypse can also be read as the end of one system, the beginning of another. Personally, I feel like we’re in a period of great change as humanity is sort of waking up to so many of the harmful elements of the system and how our society works and runs,” continues Maguire. “I just hope it doesn’t have to get to the point of an apocalypse before we make some changes so we can support and love one another better. Do better by Mother Earth. On some level, Galicia! was our energetic wake-up call, as well as a call to action for others.”
If you’re wondering why Maguire mentions the apocalypse, it’s because Galicia! is about the end of the world…kind of. Kyle and Maguire, playing fictionalized versions of themselves, are on a European vacation. They’ve been invited to the Galicia region of Spain to help with the wine harvest and film their exploits in a travelogue style. Little do they know, they are capturing the end of the world.
The whole film, described as a hybrid documentary, was shot on a Zoom Q8N camcorder. As Greenberg says, “720p, baby.” Galicia! feels homemade because it kind of is. What Maguire and Greenberg mean by “hybrid documentary” is that they had a rough idea of where the project was going, but much of it was left to the whims of the universe.
“How do you capture the totality of something? The experience of something? The feeling of something? The thoughts of something? Of a being, of a person, of a soul, of an experience,” asks Maguire. “I think that’s what keeps driving me. The older I get, the more I feel like I’m trying to be sensitive to what’s at hand or what’s in my immediate environment, because maybe that’s where the clue is. Maybe that’s what we’re supposed to do rather than reaching for something that we’re like, this is what it should look like or feel like. Trying to co-create a bit more with the universe and not feel like you’re trying to impose your will.”
“A saying we use a lot is that the form needs to echo the content,” adds Greenberg. “For us, it’s trying to merge that style and the cameras with what the actual project is. Cinema is not just a weird, flattened two-dimensional world. It’s trying to grasp at something more. It’s an imperfect art, just like everything is.”
Galicia! evades traditional genre categories. Is it found footage? Does the apocalypse angle make it a horror? Could it be considered a documentary in some form?
“First and foremost, I consider it a documentary,” Greenberg says. “It’s a travelogue. It’s not a wine film, but there are elements of a wine documentary. I had a friend watch the film last night, and he responded by saying, it’s profoundly unsettling. There’s also a horror to the mundane. There’s a horror to real life. It’s been exciting to see different responses to the film. Some people watch the film and they respond to the comedy and my relationship with Anna. Some people have watched it and they’ve really responded almost solely to the wine aspects. They’re like, I love the stomping of the grapes scene. There are others who have honed in on the apocalyptic elements.”
One of the aspects of Galicia! that could be considered horror is that Anna’s bags go missing. It becomes a main theme of tension for the characters. The audience knows something apocalyptic is brewing, but Anna and Kyle don’t. All they know is that it’s frustrating to be in a foreign country without the things they packed and to have to deal with the capitalistic red tape required to track it down. Surprisingly, this key moment of Galicia! was not scripted.
“It was kind of magical. It was weird,” says Maguire. “The last few films I’ve made, I really felt like all of a sudden, something else takes the reins and it’s not me anymore. Initially, that was quite unsettling, but now it has become quite exhilarating.”
Courtesy of Stupid Co.
“My luggage did get lost and it was really intense. It was not planned at all. It kind of sent me into a tailspin, and it was very interesting how confronting it was for me to lose my luggage in the context of this film,” continues Maguire. “The cognitive dissonance of so many elements of the world, the political situation we’re in, how so many people are being left with nothing, and I had this reaction to losing my luggage. That’s part of the exorcism of the characters that we’re playing. What are the parts of ourselves that we don’t actually like, or that we’re ashamed of, or that we feel like don’t quite belong in the next iteration of the world that we want to build?”
“We wrote some ideas down, kind of prepared a documentary treatment,” explains Greenberg. “We knew there would be a day when we were traveling from the UK to France. We knew we would be in Cannes seeing Anna’s mom, we knew we would travel to Spain for the wine harvest days. We didn’t want to script anything with our friends because they’re not actors. We wanted them to be authentic.”
When the world ends, the Galicia! versions of Maguire and Greenberg are in the vineyards of Galicia. When asked where they would like to experience the apocalypse, they admit that among the vineyards wouldn’t be a half-bad place to be. There’s water, and Maguire mentions that she could start a traveling bard group off-grid, but both point out the necessity of wine during the end of days. And if you want to have some Stupid Co. wine to go with your Stupid Co. hat when apocalyptic ash rains down from the sky, they’ve got you covered.
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