Francisco Javier Rodríguez's Jaime is now showing exclusively on MUBI starting April 5, 2023, in the series Brief Encounters.
I met Jaime when I placed a camera in one of the administrative offices at the psychiatric wing of San Fernando’s public hospital; a small rural city in Chile’s sixth region.
As I didn’t have formal authorization to film inside the hospital at the time, we devised a sort of “confessional room” where people could talk in front of the camera as they pleased.
I was back in Chile for the first time since my father’s death four years before, and I found myself scraping for memories in the form of objects that belonged to him, while the rest of my family had already moved on. Jaime came to talk to us on the very first day. He had arrived at that hospital many years back after a brief passage through the legal system, when he purposely burned down his house as a teenager in his first psychotic episode. We were exactly the same age, and I became fascinated with this young man who, while I was scraping for mementos, had turned to ashes everything that could help build a clear picture of his past.
Often, in conversations with the hospital workers, the fire would come up as the reason for so many mysteries regarding Jaime’s past. That absence became the fuel for the four months I spent with him, and it came in the form of often fantastic, often painful stories scattered along the vast chaos that formed Jaime’s life. A collection of bits and pieces woven in between the many versions of Jaime’s seemingly disjointed self. The almost literal labyrinth that became our time together found me traveling back and forth between complete mystery and wonderful revelation. I think Jaime described it best when explaining the mood of one of his fellow patients and make-believe girlfriend: “as the water line on a beachfront”...“sometimes saying YES, sometimes saying NO.”
Back in Europe, I tried to put together a narrative that would tie up Jaime, myself, and each of our relationships with the past. But no matter how hard I tried, the story kept eluding me, hiding behind what became increasingly opaque, perhaps under the weight of my own family history. After that, I put Jaime’s tapes in a box, where they stayed for thirteen years.
In the second half of 2021, I was one of five artists invited to Rosalie Invites, a research project conceived by fellow artists Alain Ayers and his partner Lot Lemm for their studio HK57A WERKPLAATS, based in Brussels. I decided to revisit Jaime’s tapes for the occasion, and I called Guy Dessent, an actor and a friend, to reenact the sessions I had with Jaime thirteen years back.
Among the many things Jaime shared over the span of time we spent together was his desire to be somebody else, to morph into another person. The magic that inhabited Jaime made him perform this very miracle, and he would often introduce himself under different names depending on the mood. It was a game he liked playing with me.
When the moment came, I felt compelled to grant him this wish through the innocent lie that I call my film, the one carrying his name. A place for him to hide behind the many faces that a film can lend. Another version of the Maze, a “sometimes YES, a sometimes NO.”
As I was completing the film, I managed to get in touch with Jaime’s closest nurse at the hospital. She described Jaime as an old man deeply lost in his head and with no recollection of me, nor the shooting of the film.
—Francisco Javier Rodríguez, Brussels, March 2023.