“Time, stop,” commanded the architect played by Adam Driver in Megalopolis (2024), and we still dream of stopping time, in cinema and in all art, to better capture moments, reconstruct them, or recreate them. 

Night Sky Elevator thus constructed a paper world beyond any era, no longer obeying linear time but rather fluid thoughts. A Whisper I Hear delicately slows down time, adjusting to the rhythm of the lonely director’s great-grandmother in Montenegro, while Cemetery, quite the opposite and against all odds, seems to accelerate the world around a grieving Lithuanian young man. In La Durmiente, children go back in time through their role-playing games to resurrect a too-young Portuguese queen erased from history.

Like comedy, love is a question of timing: is it finally the right night, the right time in the right place for the Spanish couples-to-be in Ice Burns Like Fire? Will Fiji‘s flight attendants have enough time to relax and reveal hidden truths before their next flight? Last call before boarding for, hopefully, safer times and spaces.

Foreword by the programme curator: Films about timely incidents and timeless adventures, in Heraclitus' words, about “time being a game played beautifully by children”.