Director of Photography
A cinematic journey to the death in searching for the paradise of youth on the highlands of northern Vietnam.
Director
The title of the film is a nod to what seems to be the condition of our time: never having enough time, neither in the real world nor in the virtual world. The film takes shape when a portrait photographer leaves his subjects by themselves in the studio with the camera for a few minutes. A simple situation yet significant in what it has to say about the act of looking and image making. A city is its people.
Director of Photography
Paul (Jim Helsinger) is a morose young advertising executive and aspiring film maker whose obsession with the Holocaust has gone way out of control. Paul has been compiling interviews with World War II survivors for a documentary film, and the project has propelled him to a state of paranoia. Listening to Beethoven, Paul worries that the composer wrote "Nazi music" and imagines that the plush sound on a Furtwangler recording owes to the violins' strings having been made out of "Jewish intestines." When his Yugoslav-born fiancee Dunia (Mirjana Jokovic) returns from China, where she has been studying, the two enter into an agonizing debate about whether to marry. She bluntly questions Paul's religious convictions, since he doesn't observe Orthodox Jewish traditions.
Director
The photographer makes portraits. The photographer leaves the studio and the subject alone with the camera for some minutes. The photographer returns. The gentle shifts in awareness of the presence and absence of the photographer raise questions relating to the morality and the veracity of making images of people who both know they are being observed and are then unaware. Which is the true record? Is the photographer necessary - or even an impediment - to the act of photography?
