Suspended Time
Contemporary Cinema
•
1h 45m
Directed by Olivier Assayas | 105 mins | 2024
Interpersonal tensions, neuroses, and nostalgia flare in the countryside cottage where two out-of-touch brothers and their respective girlfriends have congregated to wait out the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic. With Olivier Assayas himself providing narration and the drama—low-key but wry and deep-rooted—unfolding in his own family home in the Chevreuse Valley, this Berlinale competition selection finds its maker operating in a notably personal and contagiously ruminative mode. A film, funny and moving in turn, about the blistering friction of cabin fever and the ghosts that linger around the scenes of childhood memories.
Up Next in Contemporary Cinema
-
Green White Green
Directed by Abba Makama | 102 mins | 2016
Not quite Nollywood: this ebullient feature debut—named for the colors of the Nigerian flag—puts a cannily satirical spin on a coming-of-age tale. When three friends, each from one of the nation’s major ethnic backgrounds, decide to make a movie, they wre... -
The Lost Okoroshi
Directed by Abba Makama | 95 mins | 2019
What’s the opposite of Afrofuturism? In Abba Makama’s lively and comedic low-budget fable, Raymond, a disenchanted Lagos security guard, wakes up as a masked mass of shimmying purple raffia: he’s been transformed into a traditional Igbo spirit. No longer a... -
A Screaming Man
Directed by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun | 91 mins | 2010
The first film from Chad to feature in the Cannes competition, where it was awarded the 2010 Jury Prize, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s affecting, postcolonial father-son story is set against the backdrop of civil war, but flouts war film conventions. Har...