Time Will Not Tell

Artist-filmmaker Htoo Lwin Myo examines some of the earliest pre-cinematic objects portraying Myanmar’s colonial past: magic lantern slides. A polyphonous essay on the perils of history and the many stories we can find in the remains of times gone.

Last IFFR, Myanmarese artist-filmmaker Htoo Lwin Myo delighted audiences with his investigation into the almost lost history of special effect wizardry fantasy films from the nation’s pre-Communist era. This year, he’s back with a work that goes back in time much further, before cinema proper, with a performative essay on magic lantern slides. Based on a lecture-performance, Htoo Lwin Myo himself is the film’s narrator-lanternist.

His stories reach as far back as the 18th century. There’s a British soldier tasked with enforcing fair trade rules, and another who belonged to a party sent to negotiate a peace treaty when the Empire was at war with Burma, and more and more. A woman provides a post-colonial perspective on the use of art in shaping the audience’s view of the rest of the world, and the Empire’s civilisational mission – without mentioning the mercantile aspects too prominently. Time Will Not Tell is as much about the reality of the slides: what they show and what it meant, as about possible counter-histories that could commence with them.

– Olaf Möller

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