Not Even the Flowers – Films

Ni siquiera las flores

Mariana Viñoles
Uruguay | 2024 | 54 min
World premiere
Language : Spanish
Subtitles : English, French

Mariana Viñoles has positioned her camera in the window. As lockdown puts everything on hold, little everyday dramas continue to play out in her street, as many secret tales waiting to be told. Off-screen, everyday dialogues outline the contours of domestic life. We are invited to prolong their existence, and marvel at the magical power of life.

The months of lockdown forced many of us – or gave us the leisure – to observe what was going on around us. Turning her camera to the outside and her microphone to the inside, Mariana Viñoles took advantage of this strange moment in time and let it unfold. A series of daily conversations with her two children, held off-camera, give the viewer a glimpse into her home life. In the street, right in the middle of the fixed frame created by her windows, stands a rubbish bin. "Something is going on," when suddenly a man decides to slip inside, recalling Samuel Beckett's characters Nell and Nagg, who in Endgame each live in a dustbin. Children play. The rubbish is collected. The edges of life are made tangible by the regular passing of hearses, adorned with flowers. Reminiscent of Tishe! by Victor Kossakovsky (2003), the organic editing allows time to pass naturally. We witness the subtle tipping point between the banal and the poetic, an incipient tenuous beauty allowed to bloom through the act of persistent observation.
Cloé Tralci

Not Even the Flowers, 2024
A Great Trip to a Small Country, 2019
Carolina's World, 2015
Exiles, 2011
La Tabaré - Rock and Roll and After, 2008
Uruguayans, 2006
Story of a Dream, 2004