The Centre Pompidou asked Jonás Trueba to respond through film to a simple question: “Where are you?”. His answer is Vistillas [petites vues], a 27-minute video diary focused on the Madrid neighbourhood where he lives. The film belongs to the Centre Pompidou’s Où en êtes-vous? collection, launched in 2014.
Built from images recorded on a phone, Vistillas takes shape through short sequences. Its central gesture is editing: selecting, ordering and bringing together fragments of everyday life until an ordinary place begins to reveal the passage of time and the relationships that move through it.
The neighbourhood does not need to be made exceptional in order to become interesting. Attention to gestures, presences and small changes is enough to give the film its form.
Its diary-like structure places Vistillas within a broader tradition of cinema attentive to everyday life, but the film’s strongest idea lies in the way editing makes apparently insignificant fragments legible.
The film shows how a place can acquire meaning not by being turned into spectacle, but by being observed and carefully recomposed.
