CHRONICLE OF TIREDNESS

Awards

• Special Mention of the Flash Competition Jury Special Mention of des Lycéen·nes


“It’s not depression, it’s capitalism”. To present the latest work by Natalia Marín, former member of the Los Hijos collective (Special Mention for the Georges de Beauregard International Award, FID 2010), we could reformulate this now-famous phrase about the impact of the capitalist system on mental health: “It’s not tiredness, it’s capitalism”. It worms its way into our bodies, exhausts us, consumes us, exploits us and turns something as essential as a home into an impossibility, a cash cow, a speculative asset. Heading towards dispossession and a burnout, Marín, now working solo, pursues the filmmaking practice of challenging social and economic structures by radicalising visual and sonic forms. Here, a kind of extended tracking shot, interrupted by an exhausting still frame, outlines the history of access to housing like an exercise in alienation via physical fatigue, never-ending work: nature, farming tools, domestic appliances, industrial tools that gradually give way to a succession of domestic floors… from hoes and toiling in the fields to the lumpenproletariat of the self-employed and self-exploited. “You’ll never own a house your whole fucking life” can be read on the banners of the 15-M movement that rocked Spain’s political world in 2011. It’s certainly the case, and it’s getting worse and worse. Led by the voices of women — because exploitation is also a gender issue since women’s bodies have borne this burden in silence all these years — the film is both simple yet complex, pacifist yet violent. We’ve taken the measure of tiredness, and we can’t go on.
Gonzalo de Pedro Amatria