World premiere
Emilio interviews his family members about the death of his paternal great-grandfather due to the mining disease called silicosis, which will lead everyone to give their particular opinion about their connection with faith, death, and remembrance.
A young filmmaker asks his family to help him make a film. His cousins hold up a piece of glass with the title, his parents climb a ladder to write the name of the director on a billboard, his uncles tell him stories inside the truck cab. A homemade film; one that not only has to be made through them but, above all, with them. A ritual, almost a liturgy, but modestly sculpted around the pace of day-to-day life. Both at the start and at the end, by night, the filmmaker’s mother and father read letters to the camera. The microphone is in shot. In between those two scenes, we see the day. In other words, the work. One of the filmmaker’s uncles owns a rubble transportation company. It’s a tough job but better than working in the mine that ruined the grandfather’s lungs. The two uncles drive the same model of truck: we can compare their profiles and what they say because both are seen from the same angle. The filmmaker’s two younger cousins also appear. He films these two together, facing the camera. They look like twins in their judoka suits, but each one is capable of saying one thing and then contradicting themselves. Everyone, including them, mention an ancestor who nobody knew: that great-grandfather, “the one with the shrimp”, who used to write serialised novels, who died of silicosis at a young age and who simply wanted for his children not to work in the mine. Two gusts that are one and the same —that of the spoken word and that of the generations— have intertwined to criss-cross the film. The wind that blew against the great-grandfather’s window is that which the filmmaker has heard three generations later.
Manuel Asín