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. 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.