Impossible Figures and other stories I
2021 · 16m · Canada
Directed by Marta Pajek
Genres: drama, experimental, mystery
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
After a ticking sound triggers an explosion, an elegant elderly woman wanders deserted city streets recalling what was and what might have been, in a portrait of personal and societal self-destruction.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's formally accomplished enough, sure, but the whole 'memory-haunted survivor wanders ruins' thing feels like it's been done to death by the experimental establishment—Pajek's executing a familiar grammar beautifully, which is exactly the kind of thing that makes me suspicious.
Pajek situates herself deliberately within the lineage of memory cinema and structural abstraction, using the ticking sound as both narrative catalyst and formal anchor; the precision of how personal recollection fragments against societal collapse reads as genuinely considered filmmaking.
The decision to make the ticking sound do double duty—explosive event and temporal heartbeat—is the hinge the whole film pivots on, and Pajek trusts the audience to feel that architecture without spelling it out.