Get curated editors’ picks, peeks behind the scenes, film recommendations and more.
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
video
Wellbeing
Born in China, Zee seeks a gender-affirming life in the American Midwest
11 minutes
video
Chemistry
Why do the building blocks of life possess a mysterious symmetry?
12 minutes
video
Rituals and celebrations
A whale hunt is an act of prayer for an Inuit community north of the Arctic Circle
8 minutes
video
Cosmology
Tiny, entangled universes that form or fizzle out – a theory of the quantum multiverse
11 minutes
video
Music
The peculiar beauty of a song caught between composition and improvisation
3 minutes
video
Rituals and celebrations
A beginner’s guide to a joyful Persian tradition of spring renewal and rebirth
3 minutes
video
Astronomy
The history of astronomy is a history of conjuring intelligent life where it isn’t
34 minutes
video
Love and friendship
Love looks a bit different for a chain-smoking couple in a small apartment
11 minutes
video
Metaphysics
Simple entities in universal harmony – Leibniz’s evocative perspective on reality
4 minutes