THE HOURGLASS SANATORIUM

A young man named Joseph decides to visit a derelict sanatorium to see his father. He reaches the place to learn that his father has stopped breathing but is not yet dead – perhaps because of Joseph’s arrival, which may have stopped time at the sanatorium. The young man begins an astonishing journey through the rooms of the institution, each of which brings to life worlds drawn straight from the pandemonium that rages inside his soul. Based on a collection of short stories by the Polish Jewish author Bruno Schulz, The Hourglass Sanatorium is the epitome of a filmic dream. While watching, you get the sense that it is likely being created by your own subconscious in real time rather than by the director’s – exquisitely eccentric and charmingly absurd – vision. An audio-visual mosaic of surrealist images that, in a 2015 poll conducted by the Film Museum in Łódź, was ranked the fifth best Polish film of all time.