“An uplifting celebration…an elegant, focused piece of storytelling.” (Screen Daily)

Ma Liang, who goes by “Maleonn,” is one of China’s most important visual artists, known for the surreal images he produces by digitally manipulating photographs of staged scenarios. When his distant and difficult father—once artistic director of the Shanghai Chinese Opera Theater—is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, Maleonn decides to pour all his efforts into an ambitious new stage performance called Papa’s Time Machine. It’s a dazzling time-travel recreation of his father’s life told with exquisitely articulated, large-scale puppets that project an uncanny human dimension, created with the hope that the memory piece will honor his father and help heal their relationship. This moving documentary treats its subject with sensitivity and grace, closely documenting the artist at work while capturing the shifting dynamic between father and son.