An Attempt to make a perfect play, 2016 Stockholm, Sweden
In Maria Buyondo’s film An Attempt to Make a Perfect Play, the main character is her grandmother, more than 80 years old. The film begins and finishes with a scene from the Drottningholm Palace Theatre, where her grandmother performs as the opera singer she dreamed of becoming. Narrated in between is the story of her life in the Soviet Union, as a celebrated actress whose career was curtailed by external circumstances. Through a montage-like technique, Maria Buyondo brings together interviews with her grandmother made in recent years, with excerpts from diaries and Super 8 film footage made in the 1960s by a family member. The story unfurls through a dialogue between two women from different generations, however faced with questions about her past, the grandmother has difficulty separating the various periods of time from each other. What occurs on stage and in song, is the sudden amalgamation of present and past.