Tempo morto rose from a personal experience with a member of my family who, after a degenerative illness of the nervous system, was left tied up to a bed without any possibility of relating to the world. It was a strong experience that led later on to a serious thought about euthanasia as a possibility ethically correct.

When I did the film I didn’t want to make a pamphlet pro-euthanasia. I only wanted to show the reality of the life of a person who is in this state. I didn’t want to impose a predetermined idea to the spectator, but to make him face the reality that we normally hide, and to drive him to think about the subject, so he can take a position.

Tempo morto has an intellectual basis. If a person's life is measured by the beginning, duration and end of his or her actions, what does life mean to a person unable to do any kind of actions? What does life mean to a person living in a vegetative state?

The film is purely descriptive. The dramatization and construction of the characters are irrelevant. It is through this description of the temporality that the spectator can reach, or at least get closer, to Eladia’s world, the principal character. The tool used to facilitate this access/coming closer is nothing but observing, being with her. When we are with Eladia without doing anything, except being with her, we start to understand how can be her life.

There is an anecdote that illustrates this mechanism of understanding through keeping company. When I was filming, the director of the residence where Eladia is came once to see us and stayed with us while we were shooting a plan. They were two or three minutes. When I stopped the camera she said that she was very shocked and touched because though she has entered in the room many times and has been with Eladia many times, she has never stayed next to her without doing anything, simply observing, and this has given her a point of view totally different about her.

In order to succeed in all that, another of those important elements in the film is to show Eladia as human being, with life and consciousness, even though we don’t know exactly what her degree of consciousness is. This way the spectator can see her as an equal, as a fellow, and not as a piece of inert flesh. For this reason, among others, that we get that much closer to her. We look at her in the face, in the eyes, as if we were looking at a person.

With this humanization of Eladia, Tempo morto is generally for the spectator not only an intellectual thought, but is loaded with profound emotion. We face, in the end, a human reality very close to ourselves, despite our desire of keeping it away from our consciousness: we all in our old age, can end up in the same situation as her.

Pablo Morales Canedo.