Feature Film / Imagine Science Film Festival

New York Premiere! A man without a memory and a woman seeking more than contemporary life seems to offer grapple with a dystopian future Warsaw and are drawn into the 20th-century past. But such an escape may not be allowed. A unique love story unfolding under omnipresent crisis and totalitarian oversight, crossing between collapsing near future and Soviet history, The Man with the Magic Box nods to genre classics while remaining very much itself. The pleasure of viewing, as much as in the mysterious storyline and strange, perfectly strange performances by the leads, is in the subtle, meticulous detail of the world. Here, people are relentlessly cut off from one another, terrorism is either inescapable or a real-estate development tool, advertising uncomfortably personal, and all aspects of life metered by a credit chip implanted in the hand — all so unfortunately plausible as to flash by as almost-familiar background texture here. At turns bleak, absurd, unsettling, and oddly affecting, the film defies synopsis while advancing with effortless imagination.

Preceded by Exhale (Magali Magistry, France, 2017)

A toxic fog blankets the planet forcing people to live confined. But when you are fifteen like Juliette, real life truly begins outside.