Juan Palacios’s enigmatic documentary portrait of an unnamed village nestled in the vast flat plains of central Spain extracts the otherworldly out of the everyday. In a land where livestock seem to outnumber people, time is felt not in the ticking of a clock but in wordless quotidian activities. The sounds of herded cattle, beans being threshed or wet clothes slapped on a washboard by a babbling brook become a highly sensorial symphony that accentuates the stillness and the melancholy of the landscape.
But as daily vignettes slowly unfold, technology subtly makes itself known. Roaming from one dusty field to another, two young girls are dismayed that no creature shows up on their Pokémon Go app. In another otherworldly moment, shots of the lush forest transition to the interface of a video game, rendered in 3D animation. Palacios’s film is especially effective at drawing out the tension between rurality and modernity, the boundless and the individual. The camera lingers on sweeping terrain, taking in expansive pastureland or stretches of blue sky before cutting to smaller details of the vista, a stylistic choice that feels like a visual form of gleaning.
The film avoids the trap of casting rural life as an idyll: a radio broadcast that floats over the scenic landscape recalls a personal anecdote on the unwelcoming prejudices harboured by country folk. But as an old farmer says his sleepless nights are consumed with the counting of all the empty houses instead of sheep, a forlorn loneliness emanates from a world that has perhaps been left behind.
• Inland is available on 17 June on True Story.
