Galicia Caníbal

Xavier Villaverde


Masked as a videoclip by the group Os Resentidos, this video is not only a search for an autonomous culture, but also a critique constructed through a prism of humour and irony of the policies and superstitions created to achieve this identity, as a transcription that chaotically and ironically complements the lyrics.

From a cloudy sky the storm breaks out and, with the music, a girl looks at the book of the Great Galician Encyclopaedia, turned into the book of the cannibal Galicia that begins with its festivities, Francoism, the devotion to the saint and the agreed transition until the Movida appears. The eighties, marked by the need to be "modern" throughout the country, in Vigo took place what would later be known as the "movida galega", a convergence point for the creators of this city, where people as disparate as Antón Reixa, dedicated to poetry and music, and Villaverde, who experimented with audiovisual electronics, met. Both were two of the heads of the movement that developed video creation in one of the periods with the greatest national repercussion of Galician creation, which in turn was one of the most productive moments of electronic audiovisuals. A fruitful decade that marks the creative beginnings that were transformed into an audiovisual industry.

For their coexistence, communities need a set of common devices such as traditions, ceremonies, patron saint festivals, etc., which generate a self-identity. The socio-cultural landscape of the Galician autonomous community that appears in Galicia Caníbal is the result of the attempt to amalgamate tradition and modernity, where people and customs converge in a redefinition of themselves, with both political and anthropological splashes. Without any ethnographic spirit, they have dissected a culture strongly structured by Catholicism and its superstitions, bringing it down in the face of popular exaltation: folklore, the slaughter of the pig, fashion, rural excitements and those of the elderly, penitents, discotheques, advertising that educates and the denial of the immigrant, showing a polymorphous and contradictory culture that slips the clichés.

When we see the whole, we see a group portrait of customs and characters set in our immediate past, but where we find familiar faces and our own identity is reflected in those times. But in the end the party, of change and transition, is shattered with the hangover, after being consumed and no longer exceptional. Even if the superstition dies, the storm remains.

Technical datasheet

  • Title: Galicia Caníbal
  • Direction: Xavier Villaverde
  • Production: Xavier Villaverde Asociados. 1987.
  • Team:

    Plot: Antón Reixa y Xavier Villaverde
    Edition: Xavier Villaverde
    Postproduction: Videoreport S.A.
    Song: Galicia Caníbal
    Soundtrack: Os Resentidos
    Lyrics: Antón Reixa

  • Duration: 00:06:43
  • Languages: Galician
  • Original format: U-Matic
  • Formats: Betacam Digital - DVD
  • TV systems: PAL
  • License: Copyright