Santiago de Compostela, June 25, 2025. The collective Habitar o baleiro, together with the Vigo-based production company Metropolis.coop, has just launched a crowdfunding campaign to finance its upcoming documentary. The group, made up of journalists, a photographer, and audiovisual professionals, seeks to bring to the big screen its work documenting depopulation and life in the Galician countryside.
The campaign has set an optimal goal of €102,100 to cover the costs of field recording, especially in the most depopulated areas of the provinces of Ourense and Lugo, in order to document what is born and what dies, as well as the environmental and climate impact in Galician villages.
The documentary has the support of the Ourense Provincial Council and the Ourense International Film Festival (OUFF).
The Habitar o baleiro project already has a traveling exhibition underway –currently at the Quiñones de León Museum in Vigo (Pazo de Castrelos)–, featuring photographs by photographer Brais Lorenzo and texts by journalists Cláudia Morán, Manolo Broa, Alba Moledo, Sergio Pascual, and Lucía Abarrategui; as well as a series of reports published in the media.
Both formats, exhibition and reports, showcase the lights and shadows of some of the most depopulated areas of Galicia and explore the possibility of life and a future in rural areas. The stories collected by the collective will be condensed into the documentary Habitar o baleiro, supported by the voices of experts from different fields in order to address the complexity of the subject as thoroughly as possible.
“With this format we want to bring honesty and focus attention on what is happening in the rural world, all that we are currently not looking at,” said Miguel Riaño Roa, director of the documentary.
“Images are a tool of struggle, of preserving memory, and they function as both testimony and historical document: images almost always improve with the passage of time,” added Brais Lorenzo, director of photography.
“In the emptiness you always end up finding life: along with the reality that is disappearing, there are always others being born,” pointed out Cláudia Morán.
Habitar o baleiro is made up of Lorenzo, Morán, Manolo Broa, Alba Moledo, Alba R. Saavedra, and Sergio Pascual, with the support of audiovisual professionals Riaño, Thomas Harris, and Juan Carlos García.
