Original subtitles

[Siren wailing]

- I was born in early January, 1944.

[Baby crying]

- I was born in early January, 1944,

as a human being of the male sex,

in a catacomb doubling as a bomb shelter.

My mother, pregnant with me, had hidden in its labyrinth.

English planes had bombed the small village

above this ancient Byzantine burial place.

[Bomb exploding]

I was born in the winter of 1968 in Bulgaria,

in a world full of hope.

I remember the year 1968 in detail, from start to finish.

The revolution, the Prague Spring,

the Russian tanks...

- I have always been born.

- I was born as a fruit fly, two hours before sunrise.

I'll die this evening after sundown.

I still remember the beginning of the Ice Age

and the end of the Cold War.

In both epochs, the sight of the dying dinosaurs

is one of the most unbearable things I have seen.

I remember being born as a cranberry shrub,

as a nightingale,

as a ginkgo biloba, a cloud in July,

an early cherry blossom frozen by a late April snow,

as a snail.

I am us.

- I am us.

- But there is only childhood and death.

Between the two, nothing.

I'm approaching the border.

Through the window of the train, I see the trees of home.

In a flash between the 6th and the 7th tunnel

of the railroad I've known forever,

I see the waterfall I always looked for as a child.

[Train chugging]

[Men and women chatting, indistinct]

- Come, come, ladies and gentlemen!

See the great python,

3 metres from head to tail and from tail to head!

[Man laughing]

- The circus is back in our village.

A magician makes my hat disappear.

[Audience cheering and applauding]

- Step right up! A child with the head of a bull!

A marvel like no other!

The Minotaur of the Labyrinth, just 12 years old!

[Audience member laughing]

- Instead of buying cotton candy,

I get into the tent.

It's dark inside.

It's like in the labyrinth.

Such a sad looking boy.

I wonder why there are no children in Greek mythology.

The only ones that ever appear get eaten.

Chronos, Tantalus, Tereus, Zeus, Demeter,

they all ate their children.

And the Minotaur hidden away in the labyrinth

devoured 7 virgins every 9 years,

the Minotaur imprisoned in a labyrinth by King Minos.

shame of his family,

offspring of the queen Pasiphae and a bull.

Enter the hero Theseus, intent on killing the Minotaur.

The Minotaur's sister, Ariadne,

gave Theseus a sharp sword and a ball of string.

A terrible battle ensued.

[Growling]

I'm trying to unwind Ariadne's thread in my labyrinth.

An alarm clock, a toothbrush, a doll, a toy car,

a woman's hat, a make-up kit, an electric razor, a pipe...

What could contain such a collection of random things?

A suitcase, most likely.

To whom would that suitcase belong?

A woman? A man?

A girl, because of the doll?

Or maybe a boy, given the toy car?

It doesn't matter.

I'm dumbstruck, watching the circus acrobats.

There's a girl who must be my age.

[♪ Drumroll ]

She gets up on her father's shoulders.

For a moment, my heart stops.

And then she leaps into the air: one, two and a half!

[♪ Drumroll ]

A huge smile on her face.

[Audience cheering and applauding]

She's pretty, the little acrobat.

[Door opening]

"I'll lock you up in the basement

if you're not back by 8:30,"

says my father.

That was the worst punishment of my whole childhood,

to be locked in the cellar,

in the dark, in the cold, with the rats and spiders,

like the Minotaur.

But even that threat couldn't stop me

from jumping on my old bike

and pedalling across town with my friends to the fairgrounds

to see the circus and complete our collections

of bubble-gum wrappers, Western movie photos

and plastic toy soldiers.

I met my acrobat princess on one of those escapades.

By day, she worked in the shooting gallery.

She let me have free turns.

And later we went off to have ice cream.

[♪ Tous les garcons et les filles by Françoise Hardy ♪]

Two days of bliss!

On the last evening, before the circus left town,

we sat in her caravan.

We blew bubble-gum bubbles.

That's when I got my first kiss.

Her lips were hotter than fire.

Her name was Plamena.

[Insects chirring]

I didn't sleep a single second that night.

When dawn broke, I set off to say a last goodbye.

I mounted my bike and rode like crazy through the empty streets.

[Engine revving]

I came to the spot where the circus tent had been.

But the circus had left.

[Birds chirping]

There was only the sand of the circus rings

and the bubble-gum wrapper.

She was gone, and I never saw her again.

My only souvenir from my first and greatest love

is the bright paper wrapper of that bubble gum.

[Door closing]

Needless to say,

the basement was waiting for me when I got home.

I didn't care.

I clutched the gum wrapper against my heart,

thinking about my pretty acrobat.

I often looked for that circus,

with its family of acrobats and my Plamena.

I'd take my bike

and ride it to the ends of the earth to find her.

Sometimes, it seemed like

I could still touch her black hair.

She had different names. She spoke foreign languages.

Sometimes, we'd smile at each other after.

Other times, she'd chase me with a knife.

Once, she lit a cigarette and just walked away.

But I never, ever got a bubble-gum wrapper at the end.

That's how I knew it wasn't her.

I began to get used to the darkness.

To stop being afraid of the dark,

I turned off all the lights in my bedroom.

I came to like it.

In the dark, I can make up anything I want.

It's like being at the movies.

I hate it when my father comes in

and turns the lights back on.

I remember my first real encounter with death.

[Birds chirping]

I was in our yard,

watching my grandfather try to fix our old motorbike.

Suddenly, he dropped like a brick.

My parents took me to my cousin's.

He was the only one with an army of tin soldiers,

when all the other kids

had cheap plastic soldiers and Indians.

Later, my uncle came to get me.

He said: "He's dead."

For me, death will always look like a little tin soldier.

[Thudding sound]

[Soldiers chanting]

[♪ Classical music playing ]

Years later, there I am, a soldier as well.

Standing in front of us in the morning,

Major Batsanov repeats...

[Batsanov speaking foreign language]

"Things are gonna get worse. They're not gonna get better.

So this is a great day for you cockroaches."

The young soldiers are impressed.

The older ones are mostly thinking about

how to get over the barbed-wire fence at night

to spend a few minutes with a woman.

I was never good at gymnastics,

but one thing I learned in the army

was how to clear a barbed-wire fence.

If you weren't an acrobat,

you'd either wind up in the hole

or your balls would catch on the barbed wire,

flapping up there like a flag.

Under the command of Major Batsanov,

we all became acrobats in the circus of desire.

A garter belt, a can opener,

a toaster, a typewriter, a radio.

Could this be a museum warehouse?

The list continues.

The Bible, the Quran, Homer's Iliad,Dante's Inferno.

Sound clips of cartoon characters like Popeye

and hog-calling champs.

Recordings of the voices of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin,

Benito Mussolini and Franklin Roosevelt.

Microfilms and projectors,

with electric generators to operate them.

A writer's den? No.

It's a time capsule.

All these objects were buried 50 feet underground

on September 23, 1938,

in the world's most famous time capsule,

engineered by Westinghouse Electric

for the New York World's Fair.

A plate on the capsule was engraved with these words:

"Not to be opened for 5,000 years."

This craze for preserving time in containers broke out

just before time itself confronted us:

The Second World War erupted just a few years later.

Major Batsanov:

"Things are gonna get worse. They're not gonna get better."

"So carpe diem it is," I muttered to myself,

a bit too loud.

Major Batsanov had keen hearing: "What?"

"Carpe diem," I repeated.

For insulting a superior officer,

latrine duty and 3 days in the hole...

with no shoes and no lights.

Instead of jumping the fence to see my new Ariadne,

I spent that night in the dark,

punished for the few words of Latin I knew.

[Man whispering, indistinct]

I'm still there in the dark,

instead of being with the woman of my dreams,

the one waiting for me at The Blue Café...

I decide to jump out the window and escape.

I slice my foot.

I run to my Ariadne.

Of course, I leave a trail of blood in the snow.

There was no red thread in the labyrinth.

Ariadne didn't give a damn

whether Theseus made it out or not.

He cut his own foot to leave a trail in the labyrinth.

That is how he found his way out.

[♪ The Safety Dance by Men Without Hats ♪]

[Men and women chatting, indistinct]

♪♪ We can dance if we want to♪

♪ We can leave your friends behind♪

♪ 'Cause your friends don't dance♪

♪ And if they don't dance♪

♪ Well, they're no friends of mine♪

♪ I say we can go where we want to♪

♪ A place where they will never find♪

♪ And we can act like we come from out of this world♪

♪ Leave the real one far behind♪

♪ We can dance♪

♪ Dansez!♪

I didn't find my Ariadne that night.

She left with some rock star

instead of waiting for her soldier.

I told myself: "Big deal!

She's not the first. She won't be the last."

♪ The night is young, and so am I♪

♪ And we can dress real neat from our hands to our feet♪

♪ And surprise 'em with a victory cry♪

♪ I say we can act if we want to♪

♪ If we don't, nobody will♪

♪ And you can act real rude and totally removed♪

♪ And I can act like an imbecile♪

♪ I say we can dance, we can dance♪

♪ Everything is out of control♪

♪ We can dance, we can dance♪

♪ We're doing it from wall to wall♪♪

I saw her a few years later.

I couldn't believe I'd cut my foot for her.

A list of my collections...

little plastic soldiers, badges, commemorative matchboxes,

Western movie photos, marbles,

Bi-Bib Turkish bubble-gum wrappers,

a collection of pictures of cars from those bubble-gum wrappers.

All these things stayed in the family home

when I immigrated to Montreal.

No childhood artefact or memory crossed the ocean.

I started a new, object-free life,

an abstract existence...

sitting on the floor of an empty apartment,

two suitcases, a telephone by my side

and a chair found in the alley.

I spoke neither French nor English.

I had chosen to move to Montreal,

as far as possible from my country, my family,

my memories, my childhood, my loves, my belongings.

When you move, objects are deprived of their everyday use.

They're in a cardboard box labelled "kitchen,"

"bathroom," "bedroom number 1."

Farewell. A new apartment.

New farewells. The moves of my student years.

Post-divorce move.

Moving to other countries.

Coming back.

A new apartment.

An entire life can be told as a catalogue of moves.

[Birds chirping]

I learned how to read English in the Côte-des-Neiges cemetery.

One could say it was the dead who taught me how to read.

I was walking along a path among the tombstones.

The first words I learned:

peace, eternal, here, born, died,

God, memory.

Nervously, I trace the outlines with my finger.

And names, many names....

Carpe diem.

Here, I'm nobody.

I don't even know my own name anymore.

Here, my name translates 3 different ways.

Plato said that objects and people

are deeply connected to their names.

Since I have 3 different names,

I must be connected to 3 different versions of me.

I am us.

- I am us.

♪ ♪

- No, I don't feel like a stranger here.

[Birds calling]

We are all immigrants.

Immigrants, if only from our childhood.

We've all left it behind,

with its playthings, marbles, toy-car collections.

In the end,

the only place I really feel at home is on a plane,

between two countries, between heaven and earth,

even if I do feel alone in my narrow seat.

Aisle or window?

It has no importance.

I grab my suitcase.

There's a sticker on it.

There's a grocery store in Montreal called Bucaresti.

Since the Cold War, time has stood still there.

All the goods are the same ones

we had in the last years of communism.

Today, they aren't even found in their country of origin.

Some are manufactured in small factories

in the suburbs of Montreal,

with identical designs on their labels.

They feed the nostalgia of Eastern European immigrants.

Romanian soap, Hungarian paprika,

Serbian ajvar, Soviet kefir and candies.

It's more museum than grocery store.

The museum of nostalgia and sorrow.

[Phone vibrating]

That's where, suddenly,

I receive a message from my mother:

"Your father is sick, hospitalized. Call home!"

I'm at the cash register,

paying for my ajvar and kashkaval.

The English-speaking cashier addresses me in Romanian.

I answer in Russian.

[Dial tone]

I assemble my own time capsule in a suitcase.

It will contain a Bi-Bib bubble-gum wrapper,

a photo of a targa-top Lamborghini Silhouette,

a tin soldier, a jar of ajvar.

[Train chugging]

The train approaches Kyustendil,

the town in which I was born.

As always, my heart is pounding.

Will my father be there as usual,

waiting at the station?

We arrive. The train comes to a stop.

The old station with its century-old trees.

[Brakes screeching]

Time has stopped here.

Only my father ages in this unchanging town.

Every country has its Major Batsanov.

An entire army of Major Batsanovs

keeps order in this world.

The Batsanovs lead and give orders.

They don't ask who or why.

If a commissar commands the destruction of the world,

Major Batsanov will give the order without a second thought.

[Man shouting in foreign language]

"Nuclear!" Batsanov calls out, "Nuclear bomb!"

It's the signal for us to put on our gas masks on.

We've got 12 seconds.

If you can't get it on, you're dead.

In my mind, that's how long it takes for the world to end:

exactly 12 seconds.

Those who can manage to get their masks on will survive.

Everyone else will die.

I wonder if my father will manage

now that his reflexes have slowed.

[Man breathing through mask]

With the gas mask, he looks a lot like a Minotaur.

What do you call the compulsion to make lists,

to tell stories through lists?

A fear of forgetting?

My father had that illness at the end.

He would go out and lose his way in the streets.

Most often, he could be found at the train station,

standing there, watching the trains.

My worst nightmare is that, one day,

I'll end up just like that,

except at an airport, watching the planes land and take off.

[Women talking on PA, indistinct]

I won't remember where I was headed.

Worst of all, I'll have forgotten where to return.

♪ ♪

Hotel rooms are perfect, memory-free places.

The ideal hotel room betrays no prior presence.

Cleaning after check-out

is above all the wiping out of memory.

Nothing is as sterile as forgetting.

[Child laughing]

I did everything I could to make my family work...

but my sorrow, instead of dissipating, deepened.

I became increasingly withdrawn.

At those times, all I wanted was to spare my daughter.

I started accepting every invitation I got

for film festivals.

Other countries, other cities...

same sorrow.

Before I left, my daughter gave me her favourite dinosaur.

I've kept it with me ever since.

A few years later, I read in her diary...

"My father and the dinosaurs

disappeared at the same time."

How are you?

How's it going?

How am I?

I'm not.

Period.

There must be something that remains, though,

something you could use to start over.

The day after the Apocalypse,

there will be no news, no newspapers.

How ironic.

The most significant event in the whole history of humanity

will get no media attention.

Nobody will post on their Facebook page:

"The world has ended."

♪ ♪

I died in late 2019.

- ...as a human being of the male sex.

- I died in December, 2057.

- I remember nothing.

- I died as a fruit fly at dusk.

- I have always been dead.

I remember dying as a cranberry shrub.

- As a nightingale. - A ginkgo biloba.

- A cloud in July.

- An early cherry blossom frozen by a late April snow.

- As a snail.

- I was us.

- I was us.

[♪ Yesterday's Fire by Moonface ♪]

♪♪ The way we played The Fall♪

♪ And broke your plates against the wall♪

♪ As the sun rose♪

♪ Then we fell asleep in the glass♪

♪ And then I had to go♪♪

Closed Captions:MELS