Portrait

However, my mother, when I invite her to meditate on her life, concludes that in general she does not consider that she was happy and blames my father in great measure for his unhappiness. She considers that my father did not make her happy as she wanted, imagined or idealised. The narrative also presents other reasons: my mother had no “parents” to educate her, she lived until she was eight years old with her grandparents and then she went to live and work for families with a privileged social and economic status. Until her adolescence she worked tirelessly twelve hours a day only in exchange for food and a bed to sleep. This is why my mother states in the film that she feels that she did not have a childhood, that she did not enjoy her youth. The fact is that she did not have time to play when she was a child, or to study and learn during her adolescence or to grow emotionally in a natural way. Like many others, it was the product of the exploitation and injustice that emerges from being poor, illiterate and also a woman. This sociocultural violence characterised the lives of many separated families, disintegrated by the misery and oppression resulting from the Spanish Civil War. This life experience provoked an indescribable frustration. Portrait represents an intimate and honest psychosocial and emotional analysis of the life experience of this humble generation. I present this portrait through the personal chronicle of my parents’ life, my life, and using their own words addressed to me directly. The narrative aims to create a oneiric and circular time space where the present and the past merge into one. A space for self-reflection where my parents and I can discuss, remember and think about our lives. And through this triangular meditation represent and give voice to that generation that results from the Spanish Civil War.
For this reason I decided to shoot the film in black and white in order to compress and merge the present and the past in a single space and time. In this sense, black and white aims to provide the same visual quality to the image represented by the past and the present.The idea is that all the images have the same aesthetic value to evoke a visual fusion of the present with the past.