As her world unravels, Pilar wonders at the ‘sacred geometry’ that gives it structure

In June 2020, the US filmmaker Pilar Timpane found her world in upheaval when her husband, with whom she shares two young children, suffered a sudden cardiac arrest. Unsure if he’d ever wake up, and unable to visit the hospital due to COVID-19 regulations, Timpane was left to make sense of her new reality from the confines of her home in North Carolina. And, as The Novices shows, she did so with her smartphone in hand, documenting her life in an attempt to regain some semblance of control over it.

Timpane structures her film as a message to her husband composed in the daunting confusion of his absence. Offering a poetic, nonlinear account, her words confront the strange, seemingly tangled circuity of time in this moment of intersecting personal and global crises. Through this construction, Timpane builds her own gentle rhythm through a repetition of symbols and motifs, invoking the ‘sacred geometry’ that governs nature, and, indeed, the heart itself.