Return to Paradise

Le paradis (2010). María Ruido

Returning to Coruña after 20 years of making the first films is like closing a circle, which starts in front of the camera and ends behind it, which passes from the individual body to the collective body, from performance to visual rehearsal, from making with certain unconsciousness to make with years of responsibility, but with the same interest in a cinema and a peripheral art, outside the center, beyond the center.

I remember filming at the EIS of Coruña as an experiment among friends, helped by friends: María, Chus, Fernando, Keko, Marta… Back to Coruña after filming in many worlds and showing films inside and outside of Galicia, of Spain, is to be again with the same friends, 20 years later, with the same experimental spirit, although with more attention put on what we do. It is going home, although living at home is almost impossible for me.

Making films from a place in shadow, from an uncomfortable place, with small budgets and in a completely handmade way and without almost any intermediary, was first a necessity and now it is a choice: a film maker / a filmmaker.  Inventing something similar to that word, which gets rid of the term “director”, and all that involves that demiurge and its hierarchies, to make, willingly and intentionally, small films, video and film stories taking –to a large extent- many borrowed images, locating in a very concrete, little showy and committed genealogy, placed away from the big festivals and limelight, and focusing on life as the main source of illumination of these small and fragile stories. Understanding these small films as tools of a great political power, and being the best thing to happen to them that other people use, reappropriate, reinterpret and remix them.

Remixing, appropriation, rereading… editing, off-camera, real time: the great tools. The inscription in a cinema of no author, questioning the traditional authorship, the inscription in a genealogy that comes so many times from outside because we have been stolen our own history. Movies about history, about stories, about those ones that do not appear in books or in commercial movies. Films about the working class or about what the working class is today. Collective even if they are signed, stubborn and fragile: models without quality that find that success means to continue working on this every day, when nobody counted on you in this “elite club” that is cinema, in this institution where being a woman, and belonging to a family that does not appear in history books, excludes you from the very beginning. Well here we are, here we have arrived, 20 years later. 20 years of love for cinema, audiovisual art, friends, families and genealogies of our own and chosen, without which none of this would have happened and nothing would make sense.

María Ruido. April 2018