It seems obvious now, but Been Busy would not exist if it were not for the discovery that the small cell phone in my pocket could be used to capture the world around me. Somehow this discovery had passed me by over the years. So, suddenly, I picked up the phone and filmed everything that happened. This was done without any plan, without an agenda. I filmed only that which was nourishing, which was beautiful. After several months, I reviewed this footage, small things taken from everyday life, and knew immediately that I had to make a film out of it.
I made a film in 2014, January, a film shot on an outdated camcorder, 38 minutes long, with myself as the only actor. It was a film shot almost entirely indoors and closed off from other people. It was in many ways a necessary film, one I had to make, even if ultimately it was just to move past this conception of what a film can be. The process of the film was simple – the link between idea and image was brutally direct and without subterfuge. I bring all of this up because when I decided to make a film with all the footage I collected, the process had been reversed: so many images and no idea what to do with them.
The decision is made early on in the process – it is not a documentary, and it is not an essay film. Instead we move toward fiction. The belief is then that this type of image can sustain a fiction; this is the challenge of the film. Through fiction, a portrait emerges of the people around the filmmaker, the textures of everyday life. In the first half, a melodrama takes shape, interrupted by things which cannot be explained. However, in the second half the scenario is frustrated, defeated by life. But a contamination has taken place – the home movie images now carry the fictional thrust of the film, they sustain the fiction alone. As critic Filipe Furtado once wrote, “Sometimes the most radical act is sharing the images of those one loves.”
- “Hernandez has a knack for still life, for the mundane and sometimes awkward moments that start up a day, for the familiar and thus unseen bric-a-brac that has vanished from movie theaters” – Ira Lastrilla
Watch the film here.
So Many Dreams 