Temps de caritat (Times of Charity)
Documentary
The documentary is structured across five days, five Thursdays serving to evoke the childhood of men and women who lived at the Casa de Caritat almshouse in Barcelona (a building that is today home to the CCCB), offering a living testimony of their childhood and adolescence.
In some parts, they are accompanied by people working at the centre today: CCCB bar attendants, Dolors Genovès, lecturer at the Communication Faculty of Ramon Llull University, Teresa Pérez, public relations manager at the CCCB, and Father Francesc, who, connecting present and past, help put the older people’s accounts into context and structure the evolution of the Casa de Caritat and its uses and functions. On the last day – the fifth Thursday – the documentary invites these seniors to incorporate a new experience into their background. It proposes a visit to the “Big Bang Data” exhibition at the CCCB, in an exhibition space where, historically, the dormitories were located. Hardly any of them had seen it in its current format, thus new experiences were integrated into the old ones.
These older people, numbering around 30 and with varying degrees of participation, explain in a group or individually their origins, their daily life, and subjects such as games, hygiene, religion, sex, their relationship with their supervisors – nuns and carers – their professional choices in the workshops and, in some cases, their goodbye to the Casa de Caritat, in a choral narrative punctuated by the historical circumstances that modelled not only the building’s setting but its character and its life. These former residents have very different viewpoints when it comes to evaluating their lives at the Casa de Caritat.
Temps de caritat, 2015, 63’
Directed by Joan López Lloret
A production by the Local Audiovisual Network (Diputació de Barcelona) and the CCCB in collaboration with BATABAT
23 December 2015