Session 2

Bardauri
José Otero
Spain, 2021, 49 min, DCP, colour, Spanish
Editor José Otero. Script José Otero & Jesús Osorio. Music Jesús Osorio. Sound editor Genzo

When does one decide to make a film? When does one decide, for example, to create a portrait? Of course, you have to want to film a person, but it might take something more, spotting a thread to tease out in the person, an aspect that when explained will reveal the whole person but also something that somehow concerns all of us. Bardauri teases out a thread: work. Bardauri, with a simplicity that is synonymous with precision (just one camera person, one sound person, one director who looks, listens and eats toast), portrays Jesús Osorio, who has worked since childhood, who emigrated to Germany in the seventies, who returned to Spain when he got married, worked down countless mines and later as a local policeman, who never stopped learning and who now, retired and widowed, cannot stop working, coming and going along the paths with a lawnmower. With the passing of time, with life, Jesús has become above all else a tireless worker, throwing himself into tasks that never end. Everything, down to the way he spreads and cuts his toast, reveals the meaning of work.

Bardauri condenses a life into fifty minutes and, at the same time, gives a feeling of just how vast one life is. And in Bardauri there are also ten minutes that condense the story even more. Ten minutes that simply tell the story of a well. In a well, in the reason for it, in how hard it is to do it, fits a life, fits a world.

Pablo García Canga