AS TIME SWALLOWS TIME by Rosario Hurtado, Roberto Feo, Stuart Bannocks | EL ULTIMO GRITO | Slovenia, Switzerland, UK | 2025

Duration : 00:47:15

In a fractured world shaped by memory, myth, and time, a woman follows the traces of her future self toward a mysterious transformation into POPPY, a figure destined to embody both death and rebirth.

DIRECTORS : Rosario Hurtado, Roberto Feo, Stuart Bannocks
WRITERS : Rosario Hurtado, Roberto Feo
CINEMATOGRAPHY AND EDITING : Stuart Bannocks
SOUNDTRACK : Alex Brettell
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER : EL ULTIMO GRITO (United Kingdom)
CO-PRODUCERS : Slovenia: BIO28, Muzej Za Arhitekturo In Oblikovanje (MAO), Center Za Kreativnost (CZK), Evropska Unija In Republika Slovenija; Switzerland: HEAD_Genève; United Kingdom: The British Council, Goldsmiths, University of London

CONTACTS / LINKS :  https://elultimogrito.website/work  El Ultimo Grito_As Time Swallows Time  Review  @el_ultimo_grito  @as_time_swallows_time

BE awakens in a world she does not fully recognize, only to discover she is retracing a path laid out by her future self. Along this mysterious journey, she follows cryptic clues and remnants of choices not yet made, drawing her ever closer to a moment of convergence: the instant she and her future self will merge in the present. With that merging comes transformation and the unlocking of strange and powerful gifts collected along the way.

But BE’s evolution may not be as accidental as it seems. Shadowy forces are watching, some determined to stop her, others desperate to control what she is becoming. For BE is destined to transform into POPPY: the embodiment of death and rebirth. A figure both feared and revered. A turning point in the balance between creation and destruction.

Director statement
As Time Swallows Time is a speculative film work commissioned for the 2025 Ljubljana Biennale. Though it takes the form of a movie, it functions more as a filmoid, a hybrid object that merges narrative cinema with spatial installation, allowing viewers to navigate its layered structure like an exhibition.

The film combines two narrative threads: the curatorial theme “Do You Speak Flower?” which explores historical associations between women and flowers, and a parallel series of essays on time and temporal perception, drawn from our ongoing science fiction world-building projects.

Through the juxtaposition of these narratives, the film generates meaning not from a singular plot, but through the viewer’s navigation of narrative fragments. This strategy forms part of our wider interest in disrupting narrative conventions and reimagining storytelling as a spatial, conceptual experience.

Bio
El Ultimo Grito is a London-based art and design collective founded in 1997 by Rosario Hurtado and Roberto Feo. Over the past decade, they have collaborated closely with Stuart Bannocks on a series of film-related projects. Their practice explores the role of design in the construction of fictions and realities, with a particular focus on the production space of cinema as both a subject and a site of research. Working across objects, architecture, sound, and moving image, they investigate cinema as an experiential environment rather than a fixed narrative form, developing what they describe as “filmoids”—expanded cinematic situations that unfold spatially. Alongside their collaborative work, Hurtado (Spain), Feo (UK), and Bannocks (UK) maintain independent creative and academic practices and teach at HEAD–Genève and Goldsmiths, University of London.

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