Under an oppressive atmosphere, workers from various professions are brought together in a warehouse to repeatedly carry out basic tasks and, once they are accomplished, to begin anew from scratch. As a sort of ‘live’ social experiment before an increasingly interactive public, the cycle of events is disrupted and flies dramatically out of hand. [+]
The director David Macián will be our guest.
With no apparent selection criteria (other than their lack of job stability, which leads them to get involved in such an uncertain experiment), a group of professionals from different backgrounds are
brought together in an aseptic industrial warehouse in the generic outskirts of a big city, in order to
carry out a paid experiment. An auto mechanic, a seamstress, a bricklayer and a butcher (among others) must perform the same task repeatedly in front of an audience that observes and interacts
with them while being itself sheltered in darkness. Like puppets in a theater, each participant commits with diligence and meticulousness to his or her routine, turning the gigantic set into respectively a butcher´s shop, a call-center, a warehouse, a building site or an assembly line, in an eternal and indecipherable production cycle. A series of guidelines (some agreed in advance and others initiated later) gradually modify the routine of the protagonists. As conflicts arise and alliances form, the relationships (at first hardly existent) deepen between the workers and the audience, which gains a larger presence as events unfold. Based on Isaac Rosa’s novel, La mano invisible (which in turn refers to Adam Smith’s idea that the economy tends to balance according to a natural order), the film overcomes its budget constraints by means of its effective staging, maneuvering between the denunciation of labor exploitation and a simulated production line to serve the purpose of the spectacle. [-]
The director David Macián will be our guest.