Time Crystals, 2021

color & black and white, sound, 5:35

Super 8 and 16mm film transfer, single channel screening or multi-channel installation

Found footage short film in which a synthetic narrator describes patterns in time, which “she” calls time crystals. It is not clear if this film comes from an unknown future, is a consciousness loop, or a dream.

Time Crystals is part of a film cycle of nine films from 2012-present.

Selected Screenings/Awards:

• World premiere: Houston Cinema Arts Festival, special program Third Coast (and Other Shores) curated by Michael Sicinski, 2021

• Ribalta Experimental Film Festival, Italy

• Sipontum Arthouse International Film Festival, Manfredonia, Puglia, Italy *Best Editing & Best Experimental

• Under the Radar Festival, Vienna *Best International

• Cosmic Rays Film Festival, Chapel Hill, North Carolina

• non-syntax Experimental Image Festival, Taipei, Taiwan

• Festival ECRÃ, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

• Los Angeles Underground Film Forum *Honorable Mention

• Bogotá Experimental Film Festival/Cineautopsia

• Crossroads Festival, San Francisco

• Mirror Mountain Film Festival, Ottawa, Canada *Best Screenplay, nominee

• A Lyte in the Dark Film Festival, Princeton, New Jersey *Jury Favorite

• Istanbul International Experimental Film Festival

• Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio

• VASTLAB Experimental, Los Angeles

• The Film-Makers’ Cooperative, New York

• AVIFF, Marseille, France

• La Lumière Collective, Montréal

• HELIOS, Mexico City

• Encuentro Internacional de Cineastas 4, Monterrey, Mexico

Press:

"He manages to make the viewer enter into 'intimacy' with what he is looking at in a particular way, not always clear...but pressing and seductive. Words chase each other with images and vice versa, in an unexpected game that apparently separates one from the other." - Anna Troiano

"Fascinating and enigmatic experimental short. Absent the music, the story itself becomes a persuasive musical rhythm to make the beautiful images even more evocative and powerful. Sensory and beautiful." - David Fratini

"A work as dense as a neutron star, which activates thoughts, memories and connections with the skilful use of found footage sequences and synthetic voice. To paraphrase Morin: every object in the universe, and therefore also the machine that speaks in this film, is a self-repeating and self-reproducing cycle, but life produces a new-same, as in a spiral that at each phase, while returning to the same point, does not cease to ascend. A new individual repeats the same species as the parents but proceeds along the path of evolution: «when faced with a new critical situation, only the new can save life. But this newness, which breaks with the recursive link, inscribes itself in it and thus transforms and preserves it». Perhaps the crystals of time are nothing more than the particles, the photograms, the evidence of ancient circular navigations in the ring of existence now the cultural and genetic heritage of the new cybernetic." 

- Antonio Universi