What is time? Three words forming a question that we will never be able to answer conclusively. Peter Mettler goes on a journey through space and time which lasts 114 minutes.
A NASA pilot rises 10,000 metres above the Alps with a helium balloon to drop back to earth. Where does time end? Scientists at the Swiss CERN try to study the Big Bang. Can time exist without space? When matter destroys all life, earth will revert to its original state. Are there places outside time? A big city where human civilisation is history. Is time a never-ending cycle? In the face of death, life at last – in the here and now. That is the only life, inexorably.
Peter Mettler frees the documentary from its narrative corset and takes us along on a cinematographic free fall experiment. He tackles time, expands and accelerates it, immerses us in breathtaking tableaux, edits voices, images and thought fragments to a space-time-vortex whose suggestive power you can only reject or succumb to. That’s presumptuous, tainted with the risk of failure. That’s great cinema.
– Claas Danielsen