The Weary Hours of Two Labs Assistants

Late at night, two lab assistants analyse an unknown substance. A coffee break turns into a fortune-telling session, shifting their gaze from science to intuition. They imagine a space where rational inquiry and foresight coexist.

A mysterious three-dimensional shape, which looks like a model of a crater or a topographical survey of a landscape, slowly rotates on a screen. A narrative unfolds silently, in intertitles that are set to music. The narrative is centred on a strange man whose qualities, and whose past and future, we can only guess. As if by association, a story emerges about a difficult late pregnancy. Shapes seen through a microscope begin to intervene, as we move into the orderly world of a laboratory, where display cases, tubes and machines come to life around women working and sharing coffee. The same story is repeated – a man, a birth – but this time it appears to be the product of an improvised coffee fortune telling session between these technicians.

By exploring different visual and narrative registers around a common motif, the film suggests the possibility of a dialogue between rational thought and intuition, scientific rigour and premonition. At the crossroads of fantasy and objectivity, abstraction and figuration, the film exposes gaps of sensuality and reverie within a structured world. The atmosphere that develops throughout the film imbues the ordinary with the strange and unexpected, transforming it into sensitive material for experimentation and invention.

Nepheli Gambade