Facunda

Facunda is an elderly woman seated on a bench outdoors. Hesitantly, she looks towards the camera. “Can I leave my bag here?” she asks, after the director has instructed her to walk to the cemetery. She picks up her cane and moves, step by step, towards the agreed destination. “This is going to take a while,” she says.

Marta Romero took a distinctly untypical approach to making this short film portrait of her great aunt. She left the camera running continuously, including when giving directions to Facunda. One minute the Spanish widow is phoning her girlfriends to do a short scene together; the next she has to pretend no one has turned up.

This slight sense of disorder, coupled with the subject being unaccustomed to the camera, yields utterly disarming results: amusing, lifelike moments that would have been impossible to direct. When Facunda at last arrives at the grave of her husband, it’s clear she’s already had enough. “José is fine here,” she says, “We can go now. I don’t know what else I could say to him.”