TRAILER
SYNOPSIS
The end of the beginning is the story of an ill mother and
a son who takes care of her. There is not in the film a chronological
order but an emotional one: after the death of his mother, the son
recalls the last moments they shared together, listening music together,
taking care of her, giving her food. And these memories are mixed with
reflections son during the night about life and death.
TECHNICAL DATA
Original Spanish Title: El final del principio
Catalan Title: La fi del principi
International English Title: The end of the beginning
French Title: La fin du début
Director and Editor: Samuel Sebastian
Producer: sinCasa
Producers: Silvia Escura, Jose Antonio Gomez, Eva Alloza, Samuel Sebastian
Music: Clara Andrés, Franz Liszt
Duration: 24 min
Up
CAST
Cast: Ester Rodriguez-Ro, Samuel Sebastian
Up
INFORMATION
Director words, Samuel
Sebastian.
The unconsciousness of
the camera.
If there is something that makes different The end of the beginning from
any other piece of work I have done before and I could make in the
future is its authenticity.
The time I was taking care of my mother during the terminal phase of
her illness made me see that never in my life could feel something
so intense and emotional, so I wanted to keep those moments from our
lives forever.
Since we agreed to shoot some of our conversations, we forgot the existence
of this object that recorded our daily lives.
There is not a big difference between what is filmed and what isn’t,
emotion and sincerity are the same, it was not shoot any extraordinary
event, for me it was special just to share those moments with my mother.
My intention in the beginning was nothing more than editing those domestic
recordings over time and if my mother got better (a false idea in which
I believed every day) we could see together someday, delighted to have
passed this difficult part of our lives. This was not the case. At
night insomnia beat me and I saw everything clearer, because at night
the reality hit me hard, every day she was worse than the previous
and from several months doctors only gave us bad news.
Once she died I found myself completely empty and destroyed.
She no longer existed, had ended her pain but also the hope that she
could ever heal.
I was suddenly alone with the only company of all the tapes I recorded.
For a long time I thought about what to do with them but I was not
dared to see them.
Only when I reviewed them I realized that a film could be made with
such material, because it had a fierce truthfulness that reached us
deeply to everyone who saw them.
A truthfulness that can only be achieved through the unconscious of
the camera.
For this reason I think that the impact that have some pictures of The
end of the beginning is mainly due to nothing is touched up or
even a sort of previous planning, everything that spectators are looking
at are fragments of intense and starkly privacy.
The
film I would never wanted to make
To convert, afterwards, everything that we had shot in a featuring
film about the void left by the early death of a beloved person was
the most difficult task.
Not only because of how to organize all the material, but also because
it was difficult to translate those feelings in a cinematographic story.
At first I thought to edite the sequences in an inverse chronologically
manner, beginning at the end and ending with my own childhood, but
perhaps it was so confusing and in any case it would limited the expressivity
of the film.
Finally we have chosen to do what I termed as "emotional editing” in
which present life and the memories of the past are linked by feelings
that relate some moments with others.
In this way rather than follow a logical or chronological narration,
the story develops through an emotional logic, similar to the logic
of our memory, in which the images, music and inner thoughts are interconnected
within a present and a past that are joined by the feeling that the
world has been stopped.
I have raised many times what would have happened if my mother had
not died. Surely this movie had not existed since I had not had the
feeling that time has stood still for me, while for the rest of the
people everything was going on in a normal way.
The end of the beginning has been a therapeutic experience
for me, a way to make sense of all the feelings I was having and that
I could not understand by myself.
It is an essay about the absence, the value of time spent with the
beloved ones and about the memory and the roots of everyone and I hope
it will be useful for other people to overcome similar difficult situation
as I am doing now.
If I had to define with a single word the film, I would say that it
is human and it is the most human than I could do in a motion
picture.
PHOTOS
 |
 |
 |
© Web Design. EGEDA 2011
