Suspended Time

April 2020––Lockdown. Etienne, a film director, and his brother Paul, a music journalist, are confined together in their childhood home with their new partners Morgane and Carole. Every room, every object, reminds them of their childhood, and the memories of the absents––their parents, their neighbors… This compels them to measure the distance that separates them from each other and the roots they share, those of their ground zero. As the world around them is becoming increasingly unsettling, unreality, and even a disturbing strangeness, invades their daily gestures and actions.

An extraordinary film about memory, and specifically the fading memory of an 86-year-old political activist who has fought tirelessly against historical amnesia and for justice in Argentina. The director’s grandmother, Laura Bonaparte, was one of the founders of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, formed during the 1970s by women whose children and family members had been disappeared by the Videla military dictatorship. Laura herself lost three children and their partners, including the director’s parents. Today, after a lifetime battling that the disappeared never be forgotten, Laura faces her own struggle to remember.

Behjat Sadr is one of the pioneers and masters of modern art in Iran. This film is a journey into the life and works of a poetic and brilliant painter. Ms. Sadr guides us through her intense, find compelling canvases, order musing on her process, pharmacy her influences, and her complicated relationship with fame and mortality. Her highly abstract mind wanders into dark, mysterious beautiful spaces, and the camera follows her, providing visual access and correlatives to her imagination.

“September 13, 1993: Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin, and Bill Clinton’s handshake on the lawn of the White House after signing the Oslo Accords. A historic moment, repeated 20 times. Tainted by countless shattered hopes and with a voice-over by intellectual Edward Said, expressing his outrage at the agreement.” – Rotterdam International Film Festival

Combining colourful Tableaux Vivants, – re-stagings of art historical references – with chimerically orchestrated scenes, and playful and improvised performances in a low-tech, DIY-style surrealist setting. Through interactions between bodies, objects, and spaces, mothers and children re-re-re-assemble and turn maternal fantasies into playful experiences, personal narratives into social questions, and body dimensions into fields of interaction.