Magaluf is not exactly one of those non-places that imagine the anthropologist Marc Agendé where overmodernity (the expression is his) acquires the best representation of all the excesses present: that of the acceleration of time, that of the expansion of space and the of the celebration of the ego. Magaluf little has to do with the essential facilities for the accelerated circulation of people and goods (such as airports) or with large shopping centers or traffic fields where refugees are parked. And yet, Magaluf, the almost mythical region of rampant hedonism in the municipality of Calviá, on the island of Mallorca, is a bit all that: the town of all challenges where time, space and ego own are living outside of its limits. It is, in effect, the site where Low-cost tourism collides with wet dreams of real estate speculation until losing their identity and converting the lack of it into its most intimate identity. It is a place that, in truth, it can not be more than its denial. No-place therefore.
“We arrived in 2015 to the city precisely to tell to what extent all that is said of Magaluf and with what identifies was true.
A year earlier he had begun to come out in the news from all over the world.
And the question that we plot was how it was possible to survive there, “says Pausado Miguel Ángel Blanca, the director of the Magaluf Ghost Town film trapped between fiction and reality and that premieres today.
And he adds: “The interesting thing is that Magaluf is a fiction space in itself.
Nothing is real.
The people who are going on vacation spends four days and, after a drunkenness without brake, returns home without knowing exactly where it has been ».
The film begins as an almost ethnographic exploration.
And so until it is mixed with the mechanisms of survival of those who live there all year.
Suddenly, it is transformed into a sociological portrait in which the locals are forced to live with everything they hate at the same time they feed them.
And for the end, and by the hand of two young people who dream of fleeing and an adorable woman who resists between chaos, the ribbon is populated by the ghosts that make it a unique place and that somehow embodies our most intimate fears
.
Magaluf is us.
It is not about whipping the black legend of the city, not even to refute it, it is simply to understand it, to extract the grace of meaning from it.
“Magaluf represents at once something very dangerous and clairvoyant: he opens his eyes to what is tourism.
Tourism is always an aggression and that is what the city reveals.
Magaluf uncomfortable because it escapes to the moral rules, because it refutes the thematic parks for tourists and because it allows you to get the worst of you.
In Magaluf you can be a cynical, a drunk, a satyr … like the best books or movies, allow you to face the worst of you, it allows you to discover you », reflects the director who already before, in the foreigner occupied from
Another place completely different from another tourism, which invades the center of Barcelona.
“On that occasion, the idea was to realize the zombie army that” queue in any museum or monument with a Selfie stick, “says he and accurate:” This is different. ”
Indeed, now what is seen is a humanized city liberated 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 it.
He had seen everything, but never … nothing is comparable with the experience of taking a liter of white brand vodka and walking by Punta Ballena, “he concludes.
Magaluf is not so much a place and the denial of all the places of the world.
