The first voice belongs to the director, asking himself what sort of film he would make about the middle class. What we see is more or less what he describes, split screen combinations of archive footage and shots from now showing unspectacular snippets of daily life: family get-togethers, his neighbourhood park. He talks about shifting the focus of the film too, which is also what happens, as more voices arrive and different formats keep moving between the two screens: the man listing mundane everyday objects; the woman separated from San José by an invisible line; the Venezuelan immigrant who talks of the bus as the great leveller; the granddaughter who inherits a vast encyclopaedia collection. Their backgrounds differ, but they all reference class either explicitly or implicitly, for each person a different category at a different time, so many meanings, so many objects and references, one term of countless shapes. When you open the termite mound, you see it’s been made by them all.

James Lattimer