For the principal, he changed completely the duties that he had before the pandemic, he was totally devoted to the principal tasks like having meetings with the students, having meetings with the teacher team, taking decisions. But from COVID on he was a man in a phone, tracking all the COVID cases in the high school, making costs to the parents every single minute literally dealing with parents in an admirable patience and tolerance and humor. He admitted that when when I asked him what that means to you, he told me Well, I'm now a man with a phone talking with people and trained to deal with COVID. And this starts at eight in the morning and ends and 11 at night, and eight on Southern weekends, because then we can send it to continue tracking people so this high school stays safe.
The disruption of the COVID 19 pandemic affected everyday life around the world. It may not have been apparent at the time, but in many ways it was a shared experience on a global level. This is random acts of knowledge presented by Heartland Community College. I'm your host, Steve fast. In the documentary film, San Isidoro 2021 Carlos Pina Gonzalez shows a typical day in the life of a public high school in Seville, Spain, in seeing the COVID experience through the eyes of different staff and students at the school. The filmmaker shows how doing an everyday job, under extreme circumstances is an act of humble heroism.
My name is Carlos Pinera. I'm from Spain, and from Seville. And yeah,
I started communications University 25 years ago, more or less. And after that I started teaching. But I'll never forget my Molossia anomala. For movies during the pandemic, I lost my job. And I started thinking, well go back to the movies go back to the to that thing that I love so much. One of the things that I thought was to create a documentary about a high schools during the pandemic, how they were living daily, with the situation with the masks with his coffee measures, all this stuff, you know,
so this is your first film, then, just what led you to the subject matter? What made you think I want to look at the life of this high school and the people that work and study in this high school during the pandemic? Oh, that's
very nice question. Honestly, I like to observe things, I like to observe any human behavior. And as I'm a teacher, and as I'm surrounded, normally, by students, by other teachers, and colleagues, and all that context, you know, I thought that maybe would be interesting to observe how were humans behaving in that particular setting. And I tried to make that in my own son's school. But it was difficult at that time, it was, maybe it wasn't a very good moment to start putting cameras inside the school. So I trained in others. But I would have also done this project in another place, can a hospital, for example, or an office? I mean, for me, the important thing was to observe how we were behaving in our daily routines due to this COVID thing that we were learning?
Did you have any problem getting access to the school? Obviously, during COVID, we had to change the way that we operated change our lives, a lot of that involved restricting access a lot of additional rules, and mitigations. Were they completely open to having you come in? And was that in negotiation? How did that work?
That's another fantastic questions, too. That's that's, it seems to be a part of a movie too. With my first school, they told me directly, no, they were very kindly, but definitely, you know, now cover us, you know, parents, you know, kids, you know, this is difficult. So maybe not the moment but not now. But in with this second school, which was a high school, they were surprisingly welcoming. And it surprised me a lot because it was it was a public high school. The story behind this is that I contact a friend of mine. I was talking with him about the situation that I wanted to film something in our high school, or school. And he told me, Well, my son is going to high school, and I got to meet the principal, and he seems to be very nice. So if you want, I can pass you the complex. So it was just a case, I phoned him and asked him. My name is Carlos Pena, and I would like to observe how you work every day and your high school. Would it be possible and he told me, yes, of course. Come with me. Let's make an appointment. Let's talk a little bit about it. And we'll see how things can go. So I just went one day to the school. I had an interview with him. He was totally nice, totally kind, totally open and curious about it. What I was trying to do, and that day he introduced me to all the team, all the teachers, he showed me the fault the center, and he told me Well, we are here, you can come whenever you want. It was like that it was as easy as that. No papers, no signatures, no nothing. It was totally surprising for me. And also, yeah, all the all the people in the movie, the teachers, the students, of course, for the students, it was necessary to write a consent paper. There were all of them other students in the in the movie, 14 or more that you can see, and they sign a paper for that. But the rest of the people Yeah, they signed the papers consenting to to the field. And it was it was easy, it was very, very easy.
Did you initially set out to just cover one day? Was that your approach when you decided to do this? Or did you not necessarily know how long was going to take did you have that concept of this is a day in the life of High School in COVID, and went in with that approach.
Okay, this is kind of a range, I was there for three months, three months, not every day, but many days, many days at different times. So how to organize that material, that content. First of all, I found in following six persons, six characters, six important roles in the high school principal was one of them first, because these men was at that time, just dealing with COVID stuff that day. And he was very, very busy doing that. So it was very important for him to be there in the movie, but also the Secretary and also a teacher and a student and actually in there. So I wanted to follow these persons. So this was the basis and after that I thought, okay, I can feel them in different moments of the routine. And after that I can put things together. So it seems that it is one normal day in the lives because at the end, there's no what we can call a narrative. There's no plot, in the sense that turning points, you know, conflicts is just the daily routine. So we could say that day three is more or less the same one as a two these days, the same one as a 14, because they didn't normally the same. They go they clean, they open doors, they enter the half class, they go to the break, they play soccer. So at the end, that day represents more or less all the days, more or less. So I thought it was fair to put that things in that way. So we have kind of a narrative. So we begin in the documentary movie with an opening up the doors, and we end the movie with a closing of the dots.
So it's all representative of what would have been a typical day during this time. But it does raise the question, when you're making a documentary, you don't know what you're going to get. Right, you might know that this is going to happen at 9am. And this is going to happen at 5pm or 4pm. But you don't necessarily know from beginning to end what you get. So how do you start to formulate? Do you just get what you get? And then start to figure out how to put the puzzle piece together? Or is it something where you can make changes during the course of your filming to pursue something that comes up on how to
beautiful? That's beautiful. Totally, one of the things that I like most about documentary is precisely that. So you don't know what you're gonna get. Just to take your camera to the place. And you wait. The many, many, many other things I have, like, I don't know how many gigabytes, this kind of documentaries, you know, it's like many, many, many continents the end, you end up 70 minutes or so to three minutes. I seen this movie. But I just went there. And I just observed for many days and observing for many days, I could see some things that were interesting to me. So I took notes with the camera on these things. For example cleaning I something it's very obvious, but one of the things that they do constantly is cleaning. And one of the things that defines the pandemic is we are cleaning always everything surfaces, our hands, the doors, the tables, everything, computers. So this theme had to be present. That was one of the things another one was the masks and other one was the difficulty for the teachers to speak with the masks. Another one was the telematic teaching and learning. So by observing and taking notes with a camera, some things came up. So after taking some notes with the camera for the first two weeks later, I started just using the tripod and putting the camera in the places where maybe that day those themes could appear by themselves. So Then comes the patients, many of the days I went there with a camera and they come back home with nothing. Or the days surprisingly, many things came up, and not even respected. So there's a search for some themes. But at the same time, those the hope that these themes appear when you finally put the tripod and you create your frame waiting for life to give you what you are expected to. So yeah, it's a mix of those things, you know, the hope that something comes and something in it comes in. Sometimes it comes in other times, it doesn't. As you follow
the principle, the staff, teachers, peep cleaning staff, a janitorial staff, they I'm sure had different experiences with how to deal with continuing to do what would be their regular jobs during this pandemic? Is there anything that really surprised you in the differences of the experiences from person to person, how it affected them in very different ways than others?
COVID itself? Yes, one. But for the principal, as I said, it changed completely the duties that he had, before the pandemic, he was totally devoted to the principal tasks, like having meetings with the students, having meetings with the teacher team, having meetings with the administrators, solving this here solving that going from one place to another and, you know, taking decisions. But from COVID. On he was a man in a phone, tracking all the copied cases in the high school, making costs to the parents every single minute literally dealing with parents in a admirable patience and tolerance and, and humor. He admitted that one went on, I asked him what that means to you. He told me what I'm now a man with a phone talking to people and trying to deal with COVID. And this starts at eight in the morning and ends and 11 at night. And I'm solving weekends because in weekends, I need to continue tracking people. So there's high school high school stays safe. So that change of love for him. For the cleaners Well, cleaners started this like terrified, literally terrified, there was a room which is sewn shown in the documentary, which was the COVID from any case of COVID was prevention was put inside and his children who could have symptoms were put inside till his her parents came and taking her from from the room and made the appropriate tests. So after these situations, the cleaners need to dress in this complete body dress and masks, and two pairs of clothes and clean all the rooms several times. So every time this happened at the beginning, they were terrified. And during the month, they they started not being just terrified, but also very tired. So they cycled perceive they were more and more and more exhausted, for them was really exhausting. Cleaning every single object in the school every day, every moment in a kind of neurotic, you know, obsessive thing for them was very, very hard for the teachers as well, because now with the telematic learning and teaching, they had to prepare the teams every single time they went into the room, the clusters were divided one day, half of the class the other day, the other half of the class, you know, so, semi I don't know how to say this in English. But the they were 26 per class. They had like 13 days in class and 13 students in class and the other word were at home. And the next day, the team were at home and 40 were in class. So the teacher needed always to to put the camera for the students that were at home. So that was exhausting also for them. And correcting also for them was was very tiring. Many, many, many feedback telematic and many feedback in prisons. For students as well with a mask every day, they just had 10 minutes a day to clean up the mask and bite the their sandwiches during the break. And then again, they have to put the mask again. So it was exhausting for all of them.
Perhaps most of your focus might have been in the sandy siddur high school when you were making this and you weren't spending a lot of extra time watching or listening or reading the news. But maybe before and after, you know COVID caused as much debate and concern and talk as it did change in our lives that you'd always have people that have their own opinions and thought that maybe it was being handled properly or improperly by a school for instance, did having this experience of seeing these lives of these people Pull in this school, give you any different perspective on the things that you would see on the news and the types of things you would hear people talk about it outside of that environment, and what efforts were being made to deal with it?
Oh, that's a very nice question, Steve. Yeah, that's interesting. You go there listening many, many things, many different things from high on how institutions are dealing with COVID. And also as they as they deal with everything, but when I went there, what I saw was people trying to deal with the situation, the best that they could. And I could see that for three months, almost every single day, how they put so much effort in everything they they, they could do. So that gave me hope. In US, I mean, humankind in that moment, in that concrete context, I cannot talk for other high schools for other institutions for other contexts, but concretely, in the context, I visit, Han, honestly, I can say that, from the principal, to the to the students, to the teachers, they were involved, completely involved in what they were doing every single second, it was incredible. It was incredible. And concretely the principle, and these men that that received me in the, in his office and opened the doors of the high school to me, it was for me an example of dedication to this thing, like very, very dedicated and very worried about following the rules and following what the government said High School had to do. And following that, because well, it was a matter sometimes of many, many people involved in being at home or being confident in combination. So they were very involved and very implied. So my appreciation of the thing was, on my opinion on the thing was that they were they did a great job.
How did you come to connect with Heartland Community College to have this film included in the film festival here?
Here in Spain, I have a friend, and he's a teacher in cinema. He's called Adam. And these friend of mine, he know that I was making with Vidya and documentary and I was also cinema teacher. For some months, we spoke about the documentary that I was making. And he was really interested in how I look to it. And after some months, he proposed me to send this to your film festival. So it was as simple as that.
While we were lucky to connect with it, it's a real benefit to have this available for our students to see during the festival. Hopefully, many other people will get to see it beyond that as well. Do you have another subject in mind that you'd like to create another film?
Yes, yes, we are. Well, I'm now talking to a group of people who work in shelter for homeless people next to a place where I leave. And we are started making also an observational documentary like this one, starting maybe in one month, more or less, and same method. I mean, just, I'm very pleased to have the opportunity to go there. And just observe and be with the people and learn from what they do and learn more about their lives and to observe that with a camera in the most normal way.
Carlos, thanks so much for talking to us today, taking some time out of your day and to talk about the film.
Thank you for the interesting questions. And it was a pleasure for me being here with you.
Carlos Pena Gonzalez teaches film and is the director of the documentary San Diego d'Oro 2021. He lives and works in Spain. San Isidoro 2021 is part of the Heartland Community College 2022 Film Festival. If you're interested in other discussions about art, popular culture, filmmaking and other topics, check out our other random acts of knowledge podcasts on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you found this one. Thanks for listening
