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This Tribeca award winner follows renowned Chinese artist Maleonn’s quest to recreate history on stage before his father’s memory fades.
Known for creating and photographing fantastical worlds, influential multimedia artist Maleonn finds himself snapped back to reality. His father, Ma Ke, former artistic director of the Shanghai Chinese Opera Theatre, is succumbing to the tragic symptoms of Alzheimer’s. As the disease threatens to erase their past, Maleonn leads his father through an ambitious project: Papa’s Time Machine, “a sci-fi stage play with mechanical puppetry”. Life-sized mechanical puppets, steampunk contraptions of steel and leather and wood, will interpret their lives on the stage so familiar to Ma Ke. Both men rejoice in the present but how long will these memories remain? And what happens when the project runs out of both money and time?
Documenting Ma Ke’s heartbreaking decline in tangent with Maleonn’s uphill battle to stage their play, Our Time Machine presents an extraordinary creative repudiation of a devastating disease, emerging as a touching and richly shot elegy to how we enshrine family in our minds and hearts. Winning the award for Best Cinematography (Documentary) at the Tribeca Film Festival, Our Time Machine is a sensitive and celebratory study of memory, creativity, culture and what it means to love.
"Captivating ... a complex emotional tug of the ties that bind." – Screen Daily
