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Director Todd Chandler’s 5-year-old son has his own understanding of time: “It’s a bunch of little moments and then the machine puts them all together to make your minute.” This inspires Chandler to create a cinematic essay asking: What is time? How do we control it, and how does it control us?

Over centuries, nations, science, and industry have worked to calibrate time and establish a global standard—culminating in some of the world’s most precise clocks, based on the vibrations of cesium atoms. But this was not accepted without resistance: standardization of time was often perceived as an imperial project, a power play by the British Empire.

We measure time ever more precisely, but Chandler observes that our lived experience of time isn’t measurable. An awkward moment feels eternal; joy passes instantly. Time remains a deeply personal experience that shifts throughout our lives.