“Galicia!” Looks at the Apocalypse Through Home Movies
Is it better to be blindsided by the apocalypse or to know it’s on the way? On some level, we all know the end is inevitable, but it’s a matter of when. The current state of the world has a certain nihilistic quality that has permeated almost every facet of our consciousness. There are plenty of films in every size, shape, and genre that lean into this sense of unease, but few manifest in the manner of Galicia! A hybrid documentary co-directed by Anna Maguire and Kyle Greenberg, Galicia! marks the first feature film from the duo under their Stupid Co banner. It’s a rumination on how we capture life, the people we choose to spend our time with, and how miserable it is when an airline loses your luggage.
Galicia! is part-narrative, part-home video documentary about a couple, Kyle and Anna (Greenberg and Maguire, respectively, playing heightened versions of themselves). They’ve planned a trip to Europe to see Anna’s mother in Cannes and a wine-making couple (Max Betancourt & Paula Sartier Arán) in the Galician region of Spain. The film is a series of moments captured over the course of this trip. It’s a collection of the people they’ve met, the sights they’ve seen, thoughts on the emotional and physical journey of vacationing. Plus, the end of the world.
It’s mostly hard to tell exactly where reality ends and the narrative storytelling of Galicia! begins. The end-of-days component of the film was obviously an aspect constructed for the sake of the project. The truth of other moments isn’t so easy to distinguish. Did real-life Anna lose her luggage when Galicia! Anna did? Or was that something fashioned to create another source of conflict for the sake of filmmaking? Without spoiling it (although the directors do discuss it in this interview), the loss of luggage perfectly mirrors the end of the world. Both are examples of a person’s fate being out of their hands. How easy it is for our equilibrium to be shifted on its axis and how difficult it is to put our sense of normalcy back together. All of humanity is hanging on by a thread that is fraying.
In their other works, Hi! You Are Currently Being Recorded and French Lessons, Greenberg and Maguire explore how life is captured through a lens. They’ve played around with cameras in their short films. Different angles, sure, but also security cameras and the like. It’s found footage without the Blair Witch feeling, but there is a sense of dread. Even in French Lessons, a funny little flick about two guys trying to learn the language. Something about the grittier, fuzzier, less-high-definition imagery puts the viewer slightly on edge, as if they’re watching something they shouldn’t be privy to. Before Galicia! makes its world-ending pivot, these scenes are personal, opening little windows into the lives of people who are essentially strangers. It’s unsettling in its intimacy, and that makes the impending doom all the more unnerving. Galicia! may be one of the only movies about the apocalypse that uses intimacy as a means of building tension. It sounds entirely implausible, but the result is spellbinding.
Galicia! is as much about the apocalypse as it is about the annoying corporate red tape that comes with tracking down lost luggage or the logistics and realities of wine harvests. Galicia! captures the mundanity of life in a joyful way, enamored of the possibilities, both good and bad, that each new day presents. Humans, if nothing else, have resiliency. They continue to find hope in times and places where there doesn’t appear to be any. Those times include being left on hold with an airline customer service agent or when a strange, scary ash falls from the sky. Galicia! is a bizarre magic trick, one that could only have come from the minds of Maguire and Greenberg.
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