Slowly

"Focusing the lens is an act of memory: it is the effort to trace a contour, the effort to ignite – and hence to revitalise. Through the stuttering of a tearful camera, the director strives to renew, to the rhythm of blinking eyes, the memory of his father, clear in the details of a sweater or in the gesture of flipping through a book, but never in his full figure. Kundera, in a book whose title is nearly homonymous with the film (Slowness), wrote that «giving shape to a length of time is the requirement of beauty, but it is also that of memory». Paraphrasing another passage from the book: a man who, while walking, slows down is trying to remember. A man who accelerates is trying to forget. In the effort to slow down an image, this film seems to almost «recognise a sign of happiness»."