Yang Sun and S. Leo Chiang’s Tribeca Award Winning Documentary Our Time Machine opens next week on Friday, September 11th.
The film, winner of the Best Cinematography Award at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival, is a personal and intimate look at Chinese artist Maleonn (Ma Liang) as he sets out to stage an ambitious performance piece about time and memory when his father, the former artistic director of the Shanghai Chinese Opera Theater, is diagnosed with dementia. Maleonn hopes the work will bring the them together artistically and personally but as time goes on, and his father’s condition deteriorates, he is torn between the original goal to honor his father and the pressure of finding commercial success. Facing his father’s painful decline, Maleonn becomes more aware of life’s complexities. There are no effortless masterpieces or simple solutions. And there’s no traveling back in time to retrieve what has been lost. There is however, the relationship that has developed with co-director Tianyi. He proposes to her, ready to become a partner and a father, and to carry on forward with a new outlook on his art and life.
The film is a meditation on art as you experience firsthand Maelonn’s creative process, but also a moving look at love and loss as you see a family dealing with a loved one struggling with Alzheimers disease. For anyone who has a loved one battling dementia and alzheimer’s, this story will hit close to home. The filmmakers have crafted a loving look at the lengths loved ones go to care for those diagnosed with the disease.