From January 22-28, Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time will be available to stream via Acropolis Cinema and Greenwich Entertainment. Acropolis will receive 50% of all revenue.
Márta Vizy (Natasa Stork) is a 39-year-old Hungarian neurosurgeon. After 20 years in the United States, she returns to Budapest for a romantic rendezvous at the Liberty Bridge with János (Viktor Bodó), a fellow doctor she met at a conference in New Jersey. Márta waits in vain, while the love of her life is nowhere to be seen. When she finally tracks him down, the bewildered man claims the two have never met.
In her second feature, following The Wednesday Child (2015), writer-director Lili Horvát evokes Sylvia Plath’s haunting villanelle “Mad Girl’s Love Song.” Preparations to Be Together For an Unknown Period of Time spins a delicate web of contrasts and silent explosions that shift the viewer’s understanding. Shot with impeccable symmetry on entrancing 35mm, it is an Orphic tale reminding us that, while the heart is an abstruse trickster, the human brain — ruling us with over 80 billion interconnected neurons — is our most complex organ. (TIFF)
One of the year's ten best films... Elusively layered, occasionally hilarious.
- Amy Taubin, Artforum
Slippery, supple and sinuous, Horvát’s deliciously reworked psychological noir is a spiral staircase, polished to a glossy shine.
- Jessica Kiang, Variety
Striking... a multi-layered rumination on love [and] fate... pitched somewhere between the worlds of Hitchcock and Kieslowski,
- Allan Hunter, Screen Daily
Haunting and mysterious...a kind of amnesiac love story crossed with the gloomiest of Krzysztof Kieślowski movies, and bordering on existential science fiction.
- Ryan Lattanzio, Indiewire
Long after my memories of this socially-distanced, WiFi-dependent TIFF have evaporated, Horvat's exquisite enigmas will still be on my mind.
- Adam Nayman, The Ringer
(Available to download after screening date)