28 June 2018

Maria (2013)


Maria is a short (19 minutes) documentary made by Claudiu Mitcu, shot on his smartphone.  Maria is an old woman dying at home, watched over by female family and friends who try to make her comfortable.  When they are not doing that they are chatting to each other in the easy manner people who have known each other a long time have.  They talk about Maria as if she were already dead, eulogising her accomplishments and discussing funeral arrangements.  This might seem astonishingly insensitive, but these are tough women and their compassion is of a practical and unsentimental kind.

Maria is conscious but does not seem distressed by what she hears; it is probably similar to conversations she has had herself while nursing dying relatives.  Mitcu sits unobtrusively in the corner filming, and the behaviour of the women is totally natural.  There is nothing prurient or intrusive as the film feels like a respectful act of love.  We do not follow Maria to the point of death, in fact the film breaks off at an arbitrary point mid-conversation, but that is like life: we enter and leave at arbitrary points, and it goes on without us.

The talk turns to personal matters and one of the ladies worries about who will look after her in old age the way she looks after her parents.  Tines are changing; the participants are enacting an age-old ritual, but in some societies it has become far less common than it used to be.  With sophisticated technology increasingly prevalent as we reach the end of our lives we are in danger of losing the human touch that connects us to each other.  Maria is fortunate.  This is how people should die whenever possible, not in a hospital ward but in your own bed, surrounded by those you love, though perhaps not necessarily such chatty ones as these.

Source: YouTube/Cinepub