England, 1941, sisters Thomasina and Martha have created a machine, LOLA, that can intercept radio and TV broadcasts from the future. This delightful apparatus allows them to embrace their inner Bowie years before he was even born and place bets knowing what the outcome will be. But with World War II escalating the sisters decide to use the machine as a weapon of intelligence, with world-altering consequences.

In a clever meta-narrative twist, the events of the film are chronicled by Martha, an aspiring filmmaker. The 16mm sound film we are watching is hers. Andrew Legge’s fascination with found footage, early cinema and ingenious inventions, explored with such confident whimsy in his short films (The Unusual Inventions of Henry Cavendish, Chronoscope, The Girl with the Mechanical Maiden), is here given full flight to create a time-travel odyssey that transports us to a cleverly imagined past, underscored by the music of The Kinks, Elgar, and Neil Hannon (of the Divine Comedy).

World premiere: Locarno, August 2022

Notes by Sunniva O’Flynn

Awards

Best Director, Buenos Aires Festival Internacional de Cine, 2023
Méliès d’argent Award, Best European Feature-length Film from the Fantastic Genre, Trieste Science+Fiction Festival 2022