North American Premiere
The Time We Killed
| USA | 94 MINUTES | English
Jennifer Reeves began shooting movies as a teenager living in Ohio. She came of age making edgy, avant-garde shorts, of which Chronic (1996) is the most renowned within the underground film circuit. The Time We Killed is Reeves' first full-length experimental feature. In this film, an agoraphobic writer retreats into the presumed safety of her New York City apartment, only to be confronted with psychic travails triggered by overheard conversations about suicide in a neighboring apartment, televised images of the American invasion of Iraq, memories of September 11, and thoughts and dreams of childhood experiences, travel adventures, and former lovers. The confinement of the protagonist's apartment world is visually expressed through crisp black-and-white digital video cinematography. These present-moment scenes are interlaced throughout the film with more lyrical passages, which represent the flights of fancy of the protagonist's internal, subjective world. Such moments are visually expressed by the filmmaker in more abstract fashion, through the use of dazzling images photographed on 16mm black-and-white motion picture film. The panoply of landmark experimental techniques, such as grainy and overexposed shots (all photographed and optically manipulated by Reeves' own hands), imbue this film with a rich and varied texture. A brilliant feature debut, The Time We Killed garnered the FIPRESCI (international film critic's) Prize in the Forum Section of this year's Berlin Film Festival.
Cast & Credits
Directed by
Jennifer Todd Reeves and Cory Concoff
Jennifer Todd Reeves was born in Colombo, Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in 1971 and grew up in the American Midwest before relocating to New York. Her work has screened at many film festivals including Sundance, New York Lesbian and Gay, Berlin, and Melbourne, as well as at the Whitney Museum. Among her 13 short films are the award-winning 1996 experimental narrative Chronic, the 1998 We Are Going Home (as seen on the Sundance Channel), and the hand-painted Fear of Blushing, which premiered at the 2001 New York Film Festival's "Views from the Avant Garde." Darling International (1999), codirected with M. M. Serra, received an Honorable Mention at Sundance. She has also been featured in the Sundance Channel's "Shorts from the Underground" series. Reeves received her M.F.A. from the University of California, San Diego, where she was a Jacob Javits Fellow. She is now a visiting professor of film at Bard College.