Look beyond Magaluf’s tourist veneer and a complex portrait emerges of a community that lives here year-round. Merging fiction and documentary, Miguel Ángel Blanca’s film explores the hopes and dreams of those trying to shape a place that exists between myth and reality.

Magaluf has a reputation as a cheap and cheerful destination, favoured for excess by teenage and young adult Brits abroad. They’re present here, captured on the phones of Magaluf residents. But it’s these local residents who ground the film, the filter through which the viewer processes the footage gathered by Blanca: Tere, a chain-smoking widow who might have stepped out of an Almodóvar film; Cheickne, her measured Malian housemate; Rubén, an aspiring actor; and Olga, a Russian property developer with plans to clean up the town. Blanca’s deft eye provides a compelling film of real contrasts, where superstitions and seances intersect with the labour of those who work in the margins, invisible to the tourists who shape how outsiders see the town.

Magaluf Ghost Town is screening as part of Catalan Cinema Now! which runs at the ICA until 29 May 2022.