The Time We Killed

In Reeves’ wondrous first feature-length film, Robyn (played by poet Jarnot) finds herself unable to leave her Manhattan apartment after the death of a girlfriend, though she plugs away at a romance novel and the outside world encroaches in the form of the Iraq invasion raging on TV, the miserable neighbours shouting at each other next door and the occasional awkward visit from a concerned friend. Mingling black-and-white digital-video scenes of Robyn at home (shot in the director’s flat) with archival footage, Super-8 home movies of Reeves’ childhood (in which she ‘plays’ Robyn as a little girl) and Robyn’s pensive, often darkly humorous voiceover, ‘The Time We Killed’ deftly combines an anxious, mordant narrative with beautiful free-associative montage – often rendered in spectral high-contrast stock – that reveals the interior spaces of memory and imagination.