Rocío y José

One of the oldest pilgrimages known to European Christianity is the pilgrimage to El Rocío, where prayers are said to the benevolent Blanca Paloma. Year after year, pilgrimage trains of more than a million believers set out to visit the small, remote andalusian village, which is normally inhabited by less than a thousand souls. In this film, the story of shy infatuation developing between two young people is little more than García Pelayo’s pretext to shooting this event in each and every detail. Thus ROCÍO Y JOSÉ is another road movie, but it attends to the soul rather than the body. Nevertheless, the pilgrimage to El Rocío is also known for its secular pleasures: good food, singing and dancing, chatting, and all the rest. In this spectacle full of colourful, festive traditional costumes, banners, animals and locomotive vehicles, Pelayo gets carried away by the landscape and the light. Driven by the constant rhythm and sound of the sevillanas, he is guided by a vision of classical cinema that is situated somewhere between John Ford and Jean-Marie Straub. This beautiful – unbelievably beautiful – vision was inevitably bound to take photochemical shape.

In the presence of Gonzalo García Pelayo.