VIKINGLAND

Xurxo Chirro has a passion for record keeping and works in the Archives
Department of the local television company. During research, he came upon four
video tapes that amounted to 16 hours of rushes and were titled ‘Vikingland’.
Luis – an expatriate seaman and a migrant like so many of his fellow Galician
countrymen – is the hero of this quite peculiar video saga. This is, indeed, no epic
tale but a combination of anecdotes and Luis’ persistence. Between learning how
to handle the video camera he has just acquired and the long hours working on the
ferry-boat which sails from Denmark to Sylt Island in Germany, where he has been
hired as a warehouseman, Luis recorded himself without respite for a whole winter.
Including the slack periods spent in his cabin where he showers, dresses up and
gets changed like Buster Keaton’s distant cousin, or sharing a dismal Christmas
dinner with his fellow-workers, he never attempted to structure situations nor was
he aware of the comical moments he unintentionally.created from time to time. It is
this thankless material – both a narcissistic approach and a blunt account of the
condition of exile- that Chirro decided to edit as his first movie. One should easily
understand what is at stake here. It is, on the one hand, a tribute of sorts to home
movies and the way they conceal the frantic desire to explain an existence otherwise
devoid of any self-image. On the other hand, it is precisely the opportunity to
exhaustively disclose the jests and scansions of a life paradoxically secluded within
a journey that increases the forced distance from home. (JPR)