Notes:

BROKEN TIME is an experimental film that I tried to make as close as a fiction. It is an experimental short movie that I conceived as part of a story-bound environment, as if it was a dreamlike sequence of a feature. The main idea was to put together dream and reality or different realities, as in reference to the poem of Edgar Allan Poe that says: “All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream”.

The title “Broken Time” alludes to a time that is gone and a time that is present. The broken time is the crossing point of those two temporalities. It’s a film with different influences that I wanted to pay homage to. It’s inspired by images that strongly appealed to me and that I thought would be visually great in a film. I wanted to construct the film around emotion and sensation. And because the images are not so abstract as they seem, they appeal to everyone’s imaginary. And that was directly inspired and motivated by specifics shots from such films as The Piano, The Killer, The Terminator, Titanic and as well as shots I invented.

My major motive was to exorcise my love for a girl I knew since I was 12 and had never told her my feelings. I told something deep about myself with imaginary images. And I think that subconsciously, the film really deals about that inability to convey my feelings: when I am dreaming about her, following her and reaching her, then nothing does happen, like there is an invisible wall between us. But the fact I didn’t tell her all during the shooting resulted in giving a deeper inside meaning to the film and to each image itself because it played with fascination and the way I filmed her (the girl). Especially near the end there is a real tension because there is a game of attraction / repulsion and “nothing” happens.

I thought consciously, that I was making a film within dream and reality, (which I did to some extent). Yet, I realized its meaning only a few years after I did it, while I was working on myself and tragedies that occurred in my family with a therapist. I realized then that BROKEN TIME was not so much about dream and reality than it was about life and death. It has a particular feeling and elements that set it in a life and death context. It has a vital and visceral feeling, with the contrasted images of myself lying down and her running in the woods. This particular image is, I think, like I was trying to make contact with an after-life. And she represented not the girl I was secretly in love with but a twin sister I could have lost and was still looking for. And according to the work I did on myself, that I lost a twin during my mother’s pregnancy. So this is also about love, but this mutual love I can’t reach or can’t be given in return and that I’m running for is for a twin brother or sister I never had or lost. It’s the search of a fusion/melt between two souls instead of a union between two people.