Based on Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, by the great modernist Polish writer Bruno Schulz, The Sandglass takes the viewer on a tour through a dazzling cinematic landscape, in which the uneasy protagonist encounters the past in constant combination with surrealistic premonitions of future events. A youth journeys to visit his father in a distant sanatorium. Although the father is already dead when he arrives, the son finds that here "death" and "time" have little meaning. Bruno Schulz was murdered in 1942 by the Gestapo, having chosen to stay in the Jewish ghetto of his native town, Drogobych. His prophetic writings in which the world proceeds along "parallel streams of time....a blind track on which to shunt...illegal events" proved merely observant. Schulz's oneiric terrain is Drogobych at night. "One's imagination, bewitched and misled, creates illusory maps," he wrote. Has's cinematic reading masterfully recreates the ephemeral poetry of the modern ruin that was Schulz's world. "The cinematic equivalent of all Mahler's symphonies put together." (Derek Elley)