Sea of Lost Time is an allegory set in an undefined time and space, evoking the magic realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, inspired by his characters. A soldier comes back from the dead to a seaside village. He reminisces on the time lost while he was away, like a sea between his past and the dysfunctional present. Through him we discover a motley of characters: a rag-tag musical band, a man locked up inside an abandoned horse stable, his sister, also the soldier’s lover and who has been bemoaning the loss. An impressionistic view of the intertwined lives of those inhabiting imaginary spaces, with an underpinning of social and political metaphors.

A foul odour – maybe similar to the one that every year befell the small town in which Gabriel García Márquez’s story Sea of Lost Time is set – has wafted through the corridors of the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune since Gajēndra Cauhān was appointed head of that institution.

One of the biggest and most widely reported-on scandals of his administration was the termination of a graduation film production for acting students Gurvinder Singh had set out to direct, based on Gabriel García Márquez’s above-mentioned story. The decision felt dubiously motivated, to say the least, as Singh was known to be a vociferous critic of Cauhān. But now under the new director B.P. Singh things have changed for the better, and this a moving gem of realist cinema crafted from the materials shot is prove of it. Singh’s style honours the feel and substance of García Márquez-lines such as: “They swim to the depth of the sea, passing various levels in time. They see the bodies of their dead floating past them.”

Festivals
International Film Festival Rotterdam, Premiere, 2019, Netherlands
FILMADRID International Film Festival, World Premiere, 2019 , Spain

Black Canvas Contemporary Film Festival, 2019, Mexico