Past Perfect

Past Perfect is a film that borrows, transmits and recomposes thoughts: an associative chain of images and an imaginary dialogue across the centuries until today. Where is one permitted to be sad, where does sadness have its place? Filmmaker Jorge Jácome creates a geography of melancholy. ‘Faith and courage make thine own/Gods ne’er lend a helping-hand/’Tis by magic power alone/Thou canst reach the magic land!’, wrote Friedrich Schiller in his poem ‘Sehnsucht’ (‘Longing’) from 1801. Four years later the poet dies and crosses over to the ‘Other’, of which the painter Paul Klee proclaims he is closer to than the supposed ‘Here’. Walter Benjamin carried Klee's ‘Angelus Novus’ with him for many years, even into exile. Later he wrote about the painting: ‘This is how one pictures the angel of history. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.’ (Berlinale)