The town of Mojácar has unveiled its new tourism video, designed to lure the unwary in. It’s called Mojácar: recuerdos inolvidables. (Unforgettable memories).
The 4:13 video centres around some fatuous family in 2044 who seem to have done nothing interesting since 2014. When Dad gets drunk on the vino and starts to tell a bawdy story about the son, a family argument erupts which is quickly smoothed over by the daughter suggesting that they all sit down and remember that great holiday in Mojácar in 2014. Everyone agrees in a sentimental fashion which begs the question: have these people not been on holiday once in the last 30 years?
We are treated to someone’s idea of a typical Spanish home in 2044, and after about a minute, once the daughter has navigated the ludicrous voice operated holographic computer interface, we get some stock footage of the motorway.
The video of Mojácar itself is nice enough but since they seem to have filmed it on one of our few bad weather days (clouds, winds, a strong sea and you can see the actress shivering as she sits in a bikini top at the chiringuito gamely trying to look as if she’s enjoying herself) the director compensated by over exposing the film. He then cut it with stock film footage that is properly exposed, leading to a juddering exposure shot – at one point I thought I was being exposed to the strobe lights of a disco. After about 3 minutes of this I got a headache.
I’ll say this though, I’ve never seen anyone look so delighted at see a fountain as the family does when they walk into the fuente. Bought a tear to my eye.
The film closes again with the son looking up trustingly at Dad and asking “Papa! Can we go to Mojácar?” To which a tear rolls down Dads eye and he answers “no son, everyone there died in the Ebola outbreak of 2015 because of the health cutbacks”. Not really – he laughs (at the sons naïvity I imagine) and hugs him.
Oh, it’s also only available in Spanish and on youtube. I’d be interested to see how much this cost, I bet it would have paid for keeping the streetlights on at night along the paseo.
Here it is:
Rosmari, the Mayor, when asked by Ideal newspaper about the lack of youths in the video said that the marketing campaign was orientated at families not youths. To which my reply would be: if you want to attract families with kids, why not show this family doing some of the things they can do with kids, rather than have shot after shot of the parents and nothing of the kids enjoying themselves? It looks as if they stuck the brats in a créche and went off for a weekend of fun without them.