We are all time travellers, our present lives shuffling between the miasmas of memory and elusive projections onto an unforeseeable future.

And cinema, as a multi-sensory and dynamically temporal medium, seems conducive to the task of recounting our personal mythologies and inter-temporal journeys.

In co-writer/director Arnaud Desplechin’s My Golden Days (2015), a detained anthropologist’s recollection of his youth assumes the layered, oscillating narrative and vast, sweeping scope of a Homeric epic. As Paul Dédalus (Mathieu Amalric) recalls his friends, former lovers, relatives and nemeses, that which is personal, intimate and singular impinges on, and intersects with, the literary, the structural, and the universal.

And perhaps this says something as much about our relationship to time as our experience of it. Between a sentimental nostalgia for the golden days of yore and an anxious speculation on an incalculable future, we navigate life much like Odysseus: with a destination in sight but with no guarantee of arrival.

Therein perhaps lies the enigma and the adventure of living…and becoming.

— Dr. Varga Hosseini