Your film is titled Crónica del cansancio. Without giving away the film, why are we all so exhausted?
Because we live in an unjust system that exploits us. The exhaustion the film refers to is a collective one, both physical and psychological. These themes - work and exhaustion - were not the starting point of the project: the housing crisis was originally its central, almost its only subject. But as my research developed, I realised it was impossible to separate access to housing from the exploitation and indebtedness of the working class and that they necessarily needed to be included.
Visually, the film unfolds almost as a single continuous long take, emphasising the temporal continuity of a structural problem across the decades. How did you develop this idea and this form?
Once the piece took on a historical and chronological dimension (in which I attempt to trace almost a century of different models of access to home ownership in Spain), I realised that the camera had to move in the same way that history moves: in one continuous motion that suggests progress while revealing the persistence of the same structural problem despite historical change. Thinking in terms of structures, I initially worked for a long time with the idea of a vertical movement: the body, the house, the State, the trees… everything seemed to point towards a certain verticality. But I eventually abandoned it: a horizontal tracking shot corresponded much better to the Western conception of time, which follows the direction of writing, from left to right. Finally, I wanted to make something complex, something quite different from my previous work. It’s not always easy to remain excited throughout a shoot, and this device allowed me to approach the images in a very open and creative way, even giving the film an almost sculptural dimension.
Alongside the long take, the film is built around an extremely intricate sound design, which seems to connect housing, labour and exhaustion in an almost violent way, as though something in that relationship had broken down and become fundamentally unbalanced.
Sound came before the images. I had a much clearer idea of what the film should sound like than of what it should look like. In the earliest drafts of the script, when the sentence “open this drawer one hundred times” appears, it was simply intended as a rhetorical device, a hyperbole, followed by a single “clack”. Then I wrote the “clack” one hundred times and it filled three pages. Its simple reading already conveyed a sense of exhaustion. From there, I began wondering éwhat other sounds could evoke these broken bodies, elided throughout the film, and how those sounds might accumulate until they reached the kind of violence you describe. The final explosion is an attempt to connect with (or perhaps awaken) the collective unease surrounding something as fundamental as the housing crisis by making, quite literally, as much noise as possible.
There is a well-known piece of graffiti that reads: “It’s not depression, it’s capitalism”. Could one apply the same idea to your film: it’s not exhaustion, it’s capitalism ?
Absolutely. It’s capitalism, it’s exploitation, it’s speculation, it’s dispossession… it’s the endless debt imposed by the same people upon the same people.
All the voices in the film are female, beginning with your own, and I imagine that is no coincidence.
Not at all. I’m deeply interested in the relationship between domestic space and gender. If we’re talking about housing, work and exhaustion, then for women all of these issues are multiplied. You also have to take into account care work and the double working day: the one that takes place outside the home and the one that continues once you return home. I therefore always knew that the film would feature two women talking, even if that required taking certain liberties, because between the 1940s and the 1960s it was uncommon for women to have the authority either to ask or to answer these kinds of questions.
Interviewed by Gonzalo de Pedro
