All Flowers in Time
2010 · 14m
Directed by Jonathan Caouette
Genres: experimental, horror, surrealism
Tones: absurdist, dark, surreal
A malign Dutch television signal persuades red-eyed children that they can shape-shift into other people and monsters.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A Dutch TV signal that gaslit children into believing they can shapeshift—Caouette takes the machinery of mass media and turns it into a premise that's genuinely unsettling precisely because it refuses to explain itself. This is the kind of subversive, half-lucid nightmare that makes you uncomfortable because it doesn't want your understanding, just your unease.
Caouette's work sits within an experimental lineage stretching back through video art and structural cinema, using the television broadcast as both subject and formal device; the 14-minute runtime demonstrates classical economy, each surreal image weighted with intentionality rather than mere provocation.
The choice to use the red eyes as the visual signature—a single recurring formal decision—transforms what could be generic body horror into something distinctly haunting, making the invisible corruption of a broadcast signal legible through a single, repeatable image that escalates in meaning each time it returns.
Reviews
All Flowers in Time can be disturbing film and interested viewers should know that this isn't an easy watch, but rewarding all the same if you want to open up your understanding of what can be done in the art of film. All Flowers in Time successfully creates an unsettling mood that leaves the viewer with a lot to think—and wonder—about.
Festivals
- Cannes Film Festival 2010