An article about fantasy time travel shows/films.
... It seems I’m not the only one who has felt the past tugging at me lately. Who was my mother at my age? has emerged as a common pandemic-era theme from television- and filmmakers around the world—three recent projects in particular use strikingly similar time travel plots to expose the threads that weave through time, connecting us to the generations of mothers that came before. While vastly different in tone and style, each centers around the same premise: that we have an instinctive longing for a tangible connection to our mothers as they were at our own age.
Each centers around the same premise: that we have an instinctive longing for a tangible connection to our mothers as they were at our own age.
Celine Sciamma’s
Petite Maman, with its simple woodland setting and refreshingly brief running time, is both small and miraculous. After the death of her grandmother, eight-year-old Nelly (Joséphine Sanz) and her parents head to her grandmother’s house to deal with her old belongings. Here, sleeping in her mother’s childhood bedroom, Nelly begins to feel pulled to the past. She is fascinated by her mother’s old drawings. She wants to know details about how she used to spend her time in the woods.
And after hearing that her mother used to see a panther in the shadows at the end of her bed each night, Nelly imagines it for herself. Who was her mother as a child? What games did she play? What was she passionate about? What was she afraid of? Then, Nelly comes across her mother at eight years old (Gabrielle Sanz) building a fort in the woods. They strike up a fierce friendship.
Sciamma’s delicate version of time travel reflects the clarity of a child’s imagination. Nelly is never too bewildered by the appearance of her young mother—rather, it seems the most natural thing in the world. Because in many ways, it’s something we wonder about as children. “If I met my mother when [we were both] eight years old, what would our relationship be?” Sciamma mused to
The Hollywood Reporter. “Would she be my sister? Would we be friends? Would we share the same father? All those kind of things.”
Jia Ling’s
Hi, Mom (Nǐ hǎo, Lǐ Huànyīng), a hugely successful Chinese film from 2021, features a similar mother-daughter time travel plot. Nineteen-year-old Ling (Jia Ling) feels like a disappointment to her mother, Ying (Liu Jia). She is not exceptionally smart or conventionally beautiful. She is, she feels, unremarkable. When her mother’s life is threatened by a car accident, Ling finds herself suddenly flung back in time to 1981—a year before her own birth—where her mother mistakes her for a cousin from out of town. ...
https://lithub.com/why-films-around...time-travel-to-explore-mothers-and-daughters/