Filme Pin, Filme Pin

The project started during the years we were living in exile in Portugal. We had become friends with people in our neighbourhood, and during one of those visits, during the pandemic, a box of pins came up in conversation. We asked its owner, a British woman in her forties whose collection once belonged to her grandfather, if we could film them while she told us about the memories associated with each one. We never intended to film her directly. Everything revolved around the pins, and we listened to her reactions as we discovered them together.

A few weeks later, we returned with a sound recorder and a camera. It was not an interview. We approached the matter in a more theatrical, cinematic way, trying to extract the dramatic qualities of the objects. We set up a macro lens and made a small, intimate set in order to film the pins as literal objects, as if they were about to become subjects and sculptures, memories and desires, cinema and rumour. The very act of filming was the starting point, with the knowledge that we would end up projecting these images on a cinema screen.

Given that it is not the filmmaker’s voice, but rather the voice of someone who discovers this collection as part of something larger than her own family, international solidarity, anti-colonial struggles, and so on, it seems to us that the desire to hear her, or not, belongs more to the audience than to the film’s intentions. For our part, as filmmakers, we listened to her for a lot longer than what ultimately remained in the film. Of course the editing process enabled us to select what we most wanted to convey in this case: cinema’s ability to produce memories that we are not even sure we have lived through, and to generate desires, such as the one expressed in the film, the wish that all of this had been filmed earlier. In our opinion, listening resembles what Simone Weil described as attention: far more than a mental faculty, it is a spiritual act, a sort of prayer, and “the rarest and purest form of generosity.” -even though we don’t place much faith in purity.

Super 8 is a very powerful and intimate format, closely associated with what we have often called the domestic sphere, but it is also a format that made it possible for images to travel differently, a compact format. We consider it one of our mediums and one of the sources of our artistic practice. Its presence deserves to be put forward as an integral part of the scene: it testifies to the fact that other people were present, people who were talking and paying attention. Super 8 enables us to pay attention to plebeian and popular objects. To put things simply, it is a format that cooperates with the pins.

In a way, this is consistent with what we have described above: we do not only pay attention to what the voice-over says, we also listen to what the pins themselves have to say, and to what their backs reveal their materiality. We can see the light’s reflections on the metal; it is a sculptural experience. In doing so, we conjure the bodies that may once have worn them; specters, glimmers, flashes. What is beautiful about Filme Pin is that it was made with love, critical thinking and curiosity, as a call to small gestures of recognition: to simplicity, to the beauty of lightness and to the weight of something that weighs almost nothing and yet contains everything. The Colombian writer Juan Cárdenas has written about the weightlessness of art, and that idea has stayed with us, because these pins are exactly that: light enough to be worn on a chest, yet heavy enough to carry many stories.