Dead Time

Canada, Steve Sanguedolce

Scene from "Dead Time"

The film as a handcrafted piece of art: a story about incest survivors in the city jungle. Alienated family cinema where every picture is modified and coloured manually. Original, emotionally strong and experimental.

How do you tell a story of a life in the shadow of sexual abuse, drug exzesses and prostitution? Definitely not with beautiful, flawless pictures. Or shot as a ‘chronic of events’. Or as a classical sentimental melodrama. But maybe as ‘family cinema’ of another kind. Director Steve Sanguedolce admits, he has always been fascinated by the rough film language of home-videos.
In this diary-film about the two sisters Wendy and Julie and their attempts to escape from their history, Sanguedolce took all fake ‘normality’ from the pictures. Every picture is ‘handmade’ and alienated like a cartoon. Besides this, we hear stories about the living deads from the world of drugs, who try not to totally lose contact with the real world and to deal with the secrets of their ‘terrible childhood’. A great art film which seems more ‘realistic’ than some social documentaries with good intentions. Definitely not ‘dead time’, that’s how the pimp describes his stay in prison.