A South-facing House in Gyeonggi Province [경기도의 어느 남향 집]

What do you need to make a film? Sometimes, a thousand things. Sometimes, very few. A house, for example. In the house, a family. A woman and three men. The three men are the woman’s father, her husband and her son. We never see one of the men. The son. Invisible, silent, he films. He films the house: its lines, its vanishing points, its lights, its reflections, its shadows, its inhabitants... Its inhabitants speak little. Sometimes they eat together, they heat water, raise and lower shutters, pray, watch television... The woman always sits on the floor. Sometimes the husband does too, sometimes not. The son films all this. Furthermore, he records the sounds. This film is not just for watching but for listening to as well. A house is its sounds too. The sounds that come from inside and the sounds that come from outside. The sounds are like the shadows and the reflections. They pervade the space. They transform it. They make us see what is in the image with more intensity but they also make us see, perhaps hallucinate, what is not there. A water heater, a dripping tap, a fan that never stops are, at the end of the day, inanimate inhabitants of this house, as normal as the woman and the men. What is taking place? Should we think that, like in a famous poem, nothing is taking place except the place itself? Maybe. But, from within the film, without raising its voice, the memory of another poem emerges. A cinematographic poem. Its poster stares at us, stuck to a door: How Green Was My Valley. We remember. It was the story of a family and also the story of a house. It was a film with songs, with incredible compositions and with an incredible light. It was also the long, loving and torn farewell to a family home. Will this film we are watching now be as rigorous, as silent and yet as full of sound as the film from the poster, a long farewell? Maybe. Nothing says so. The film does not force us to think so. It does not force us to think anything. It invites us into that place, into the house, to see, to listen.

Pablo García Canga