The Hourglass Sanatorium

Visiting his dying father at a gothic sanatorium, Jozef enters a portal into his subconscious, into memories and characters from his past. The film is based on stories by Bruno Schultz – dubbed the Polish Franz Kafka – whose controversial works were published in the 1920s and 30s and who became one of the most admired names of the 1960s, about two and a half decades after he was killed by the Nazis. Wojciech J. Has, a leading director of the middle generation of Polish cinema, with a metaphysical penchant and an attraction to visual and intellectual challenges, adapts this complex literary work into a work of poetic cinema that through atmosphere and intimacy, and extraordinary camera work of Witold Sobocinski, touches upon human memory and has psychoanalytical resonance.