Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass

A ghostly train journey on a forgotten branch line transports a son, Jozef, visiting his dying Father in a remote Galician Sanatorium. Upon arrival Jozef finds the Sanatorium entirely moribund and run by a dubious Doctor Gotard who tells him that his father’s death, the death that has struck him in his country has not yet occurred, and that here they are always late by a certain interval of time of which the length cannot be defined. Jozef will come to realise that the Sanatorium is a floating world halfway between sleep and wakefulness and that time and events cannot be measured in any tangible form.

Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass is the third and long-awaited feature film by the Quay Brothers, made in stop motion animation and live action. It is inspired by the book of the same name by one of their reference writers, Bruno Schulz (Street of Crocodiles). “Schulz was a gift to the Polish language, because of its richness and the metaphors he used” declare the Quay Brothers. The protagonist, Jozef (Tadeusz Janiszewski), travels to a sanatorium where his father lies dying, only to discover that the place is a suspended reality between sleep and wakefulness, where time is diluted. With a hypnotic and surreal atmosphere, the Quays explore the fragmentation of memory and mourning. As the directors state, “It is a floating space, a universe created in a fragmentary way, without a linear narrative.” This baroque tale of temporal distortions took more than ten years to bring to fruition and was presented at the Giornate degli Autori of the Venice Film Festival.

> With the presence of the Quay brothers.