The Hourglass Sanatorium

Director: Wojciech Has

1973 / 124min / DCP

Based on 12 tales written by the Polish Jewish fabulist Bruno Schulz, Has’s elaborately structured phantasmagorical film begins by following Józef (Jan Nowicki) on a trip to visit his dying father. Inside the dilapidated sanatorium where his father is held, Józef will encounter a variety of characters who seem to have come from out of his personal history, discovering that the usual boundaries between dream and waking life no longer exist inside the institution’s walls. An uncanny and elegiac film whose depiction of pre-World War II Poland is haunted by a sense of looming apocalypse.