In June 2020, the US filmmaker Pilar Timpane found her world in upheaval when her husband, with whom she shares two young children, suffered a sudden cardiac arrest. Unsure if he’d ever wake up, and unable to visit the hospital due to COVID-19 regulations, Timpane was left to make sense of her new reality from the confines of her home in North Carolina. And, as The Novices shows, she did so with her smartphone in hand, documenting her life in an attempt to regain some semblance of control over it.
Timpane structures her film as a message to her husband composed in the daunting confusion of his absence. Offering a poetic, nonlinear account, her words confront the strange, seemingly tangled circuity of time in this moment of intersecting personal and global crises. Through this construction, Timpane builds her own gentle rhythm through a repetition of symbols and motifs, invoking the ‘sacred geometry’ that governs nature, and, indeed, the heart itself.
Writer, Narrator and Editor: Pilar Timpane
Composer and Sound designer: Lorah Stone
Website: The Novices
videoLove and friendship
What does it mean to say goodbye to a creature that doesn’t know you’re leaving?
13 minutes
videoMedicine
Drinking wine from toxic cups was the 17th century’s own dubious ‘detox’ treatment
11 minutes
videoFamily life
A mother and child bond in an unusual prison visitation space in this poignant portrait
11 minutes
videoIllness and disease
Humanity eradicated smallpox 45 years ago. It’s a story worth remembering
25 minutes
videoHuman rights and justice
Surreal, dazzling visuals form an Iranian expat’s tribute to defiance back home
10 minutes
videoConsciousness and altered states
‘I want me back’ – after a head injury, Nick struggles with his altered reality
7 minutes
videoLove and friendship
Never marry a man you love too much, and other views on romance in Sierra Leone
5 minutes
videoVirtues and vices
Why Bennie tried to disappear, and what happened when he was found decades later
16 minutes
videoHistory of technology
Curious singles and tech sceptics – what ‘computer dating’ looked like in 1966
6 minutes