24/05
in defense of boredom
In the budding wake of early May, I spent several days without a phone. Not a self induced technology detox, but rather collateral in my now mildly revisionist history involving a heist scenario set in London. Imagine this - 11am Brixton, me in a trench coat (London after all), outside a coffee shop, neck craned, scrolling through a list of future workout classes to offset the perils of an Anglican holiday. 7:15am barre selected and swipe goes my phone from my palm into the paws of an e-bike-zooming-slenderman-esque figure clad in all black with a ski mask. In vein, I, along with English passerbys chased the culprit, eventually succumbing to the inevitable. Another phone lost into the ether of petty city crime. However, unlike my archive of past theft, this involved the Metropolitan Police Service - an enlightening window into the world of pleasant law enforcement and, the cherry on top, an escorted ride to Heathrow Airport. “Miss, you don’t get motion sickness do you?” as Sergeant Gavin proceeded to flick on the siren, zipping me through the streets of London; hence the “heist”.
Deprived of the tick of incessant email checking and feed refreshing, the timing of the incident felt uncanny. Six weeks had passed since I had been freed from the shackles of freelance-reliant capitalism; thrown into a disorienting spree of how to fill said previously soul-sucking time. Naturally, fill the soul back up! Like a kid in a candy shop, I swirled around an endless vortex, racking up city steps. Time, for once, was on my side, so why not walk it out? J’ai flâné my way around the boroughs. I hit the bridges hard, struck with a cacophony of subway sounds - that unpredictable, manic serpent violently ejaculating its presence onto its victims.
The current flow of free time, had for better or worse, once again released floodgates of curiosity. I became an ambler, dragging my suede navy blue Italian ballerina flats across the filthy city sidewalks. I floated in and out of bookstores; read the plaques on benches in Riverside Park; “taste tested” trail mix at grocery stores; rewrote a screenplay set in Greece; gnawed on packets of Italian gum emerging from last summer’s jackets; I paced and paced and paced around my greenhouse apartment fuming with anxious energy.
For two weeks, I basked in boredom, in the lightness (a sprinkle of joy perhaps?) that eventually resulted from a disconnect from the productive world. But alas, what goes up must come down. It only took a week at the Cannes Film Festival to unravel an iota of enlightenment I could have hoped to achieve. As a filmmaker, I have come to savour, almost to my detriment, the value derived from film festivals. Until we reach the sweet promise of pre-production, our day to day (often multi-year) reality is a dystopian, solitary black hole comprised of screenplay rewrites and never-ending film financing. Film festivals nourish us with hope and even more so, a naive optimism that, you too, can have a shot at an obnoxiously long standing ovation at the Grand Théâtre Lumière.
After several years spent attending film festivals, I have yet to discover the antidote against post festival blues; how to equilibrate the highs of promise with the lows of reality. Instinct whispers - fill your time silly; blind yourself with distractions; under no circumstance sit still. As child, encouraged (perhaps too much) to fill my time with productive pursuits, I was often reprimanded for expressing boredom. Though the struggle to resist feelings of ennui painstakingly persists, its purpose for an artist is essential. Productivity-filled time serves the very purpose it advertises - it consumes attention, filters your line of sight. Boredom slows it all down; forcing one to see everything, focus on the minutiae. Perhaps boredom is the unassuming, coy instigator of a story?
1. My Mother Laughs (2013) by Chantal Ackerman
Ah, the queen of boredom and sloooow cinema. Nothing but everything happens in Ackerman’s films - my favorite genre of filmmaking. Often set in a bedroom or kitchen, Ackerman’s films are an honest exhibition of domestic life and the vérité underneath the seemingly mundane. I stumbled upon My Mother Laughs, at Mercer Books, previously unfamiliar with the text. Ackerman finds herself living back in Belgium caring for her mother, resulting in a diary text; an actual and imagined conversation with her mother during her final days.
2. Billy Elliot (2000) - Stephen Daldry
S/O to the excellent curation on British Airways; a reminder of the groundbreaking cinema of the early millennia. I first saw Billy Elliot as a child at a family friend’s house in Montauk circa 2001. The adults gushed over its provocations while savoring their Miso Chilean Sea Bass. Having zero memory of the content of the film, it returned to my conscious after meeting Jamie Bell at the Ritz at Berlinale this year. On my flight, without an ounce of alcohol in my system, thousands of feet above the Atlantic, too many tears were shed at its sheer perfection. Swan Lake on repeat.
3. Lorelei and Athens by Zans Brady Krohn
Phoneless at Heathrow, striped of the luxury of music or podcasts, I cracked open the Spring 2026 Paris Review to the issue’s riveting, perverse intro fiction, Lorelei and Athens. Go in blind, indulge in the oddities. A clue - it’s a literary Daisies by Czech filmmaker Věra Chytilová.
4. A Woman Like the Sun (1975) - Lee Man-hui
Continuing with my recent trend of “aimless, free, curious women, taking in the world around them”, A Woman Like the Sun is currently featured as a part of the series, “Korean Cinema’s Celluloid Fever - The 70s” at Film at Lincoln Center. Chang-Yun, a Jane Birkin-esque ingenue is meeting her friends at the beach during a heat wave in Seoul. As she is about to board the train, she gets robbed and then begins her adventure to the beach and the characters she meets along the way. Spoiler, she never makes it to the beach.
5. Marie & Bruce (2004) - Tom Cairns
A part of Metrograph’s delightful “Wallace Shawn” retrospective, Marie & Bruce had its first public theatrical screening since its premiere at Sundance in 2004. Also set during a summer heat wave, but in New York (ooffff), Marie & Bruce is a day in the life of married couple Marie (Julianne Moore) and Bruce (blast from the past, my childhood crush, Matthew Broderick). Directed by Tom Cairns and written by Cairns and Wallace Shawn, the film captures the fever dream, summer hallucinations from both the POV of Marie and Bruce, equally deluded in their unhappy marriage. But, is it the marriage or just the heat wave? Cairns’ and Shawn’s presence in the Q&A added to the dreamlike quality of the film. Failing to secure theatrical distribution, neither had seen the film since 2004 and hilariously also had zero recollection of its Buñuelian elements.
