Waiting for Casimir

In this era of hypermodernity, time is a tyrant. The ticking of our lives has accelerated to a pace that is hardly humanly bearable. In Waiting for Casimir, Christian Mathieu Fournier opens the doors to a house forgotten by this sinister dictator. In a retirement home that hosts more clocks than residents, the claustrophobic setting is paced by the ticking of pendulums and the labored breaths of its inhabitants.

The improbable and offbeat universe constructed by the filmmaker opens an imaginary portal into what time might feel like when embodied in an aging body. Childhood appears in the figure of a young girl dancing barefoot at sunrise; death seems to lurk in the twilight streets of a timeless village; the absurd tinges the professional gestures of a community TV crew; and poetry emerges in the few phrases murmured by sleepwalking residents. Waiting for Casimir plunges us into a time suspended between sleep and awakening, where the most astonishing visions arise. Somewhere between the theater of the absurd, observational cinema, and surrealist poetry, this film brilliantly reinvents the practice of documentary filmmaking: that is, exploding reality in order to reveal its invisible secrets.

Naomie Décarie-Daigneault
Tënk's Artistic Director