He whose face gives no light

For her first film, Andrea Bussmann has chosen to film the filming of a fiction film.
But it is unequivocally in no way a making of but rather a gallery of portraits of old
people, residents of Mexico gathered together for the occasion in a run-down bar
in the capital. None of them are actors, and do not pretend to be. They were spotted
in the downtown streets where they paraded their misery, their alcoholism and their
solitude and were invited to earn a few pennies patiently waiting for the camera to
shoot them as extras. Profiting from the moments when the camera crew from the
other film set up a shot, these extras, sitting on a seat they must not leave, confide
things to the director and in a few phrases they reveal their banal and pathetic
existence, for once grabbing a spotlight which is usually denied them. It is this
spotlight, and a William Blake’s poem evoking it, that closes the film, given that the
beautiful final sequence presents a succession of these ephemeral actors and offers
them a text to which they apply themselves and stumble over, but which seems
written for them. (JPR)