Our Time Machine: Memory, Story, and Connection

When artist Maleonn realizes that his father suffers from Alzheimer’s disease, he creates “Papa’s Time Machine,” a magical, autobiographical stage performance featuring life-size mechanical puppets.Through the production of this play, the two men confront their mortality before time runs out and memories are lost forever. Official Selection, Tribeca Film Festival.

In Our Time Machine,filmmakers S. Leo Chiang and Yang Sun follow Chinese artist, Maleonn’s (Ma Liang), attempt to honor his father’s memory – not his life, his actual memory. Ma Ke, himself an accomplished artist as longtime Peking Opera director, has not yet died, but has Alzheimer’s disease. Using art (his comfort zone), Maelonn is trying to preserve their father-son memories.

He creates “Papa’s Time Machine,” a magical, autobiographical stage performance featuring life-size mechanical puppets. The performance provides teachers and students an opportunity to consider the themes we relate to in autobiography, how it can help us to find and reflect on our own stories, and how we choose to tell our stories.

Students will use the stories that Maleonn chooses to tell as a springboard for telling their own autobiographical story, and in doing so, connecting their own life story to universal human themes.

Faith Rogow, Ph.D., is the co-author of The Teacher’s Guide to Media Literacy: Critical Thinking in a Multimedia World (Corwin, 2012) and past president of the National Association for Media Literacy Education. She has written discussion guides and lesson plans for more than 250 independent films.