Animación en la sala de espera

Carlos Rodríguez Sánchez (deceased 1984), a theatre and film critic, and Manuel Coronado used a very austere, independent approach for this film, possibly influenced by the Bellocchio of Fit to be Untied. It resulted from long and attentive visits to the patients in Linares psychiatric hospital, from photographic work and a patient mise en scène of faces, bodies and the words of “mental illness”. The film avoids the trap of compassion and tries to bring the spectator nearer to the tormented yet banal world of the asylum. The “activities” proposed to the patients (theatre, dances, television and handiwork), rather than provide a chance for observation, are more useful for listening to the words kept solely for the filmmakers’ears – words expressing oppression by family and society, religious obsession and the torments produced by society and history. What repeatedly emerges is the family, that common human destiny which is a source of happiness and a suffering, echoed by a child’s crying during the end credits. One of the patients, now out of the asylum, tells of the poverty, solitude and emptiness that follow in the outside world. The inmates scatter out in a walk through the woods-a rare moment, which conveys the pressing need for some form of liberation.