One of the most far-reaching events in a human life is the birth of your baby. But life with a newborn can be so ordinary and at the same time all-embracing: the wash is drying in the corridor, the bathroom has to be cleaned. In the calm rhythm of the day, ORDINARY TIME skims past authentic moments like this.
In her feature debut, the Portuguese filmmaker Susana Nobre presents pregnancy leave in a charming and sensitive way, while avoiding the romance and the drama. Conversations with visiting friends do open up a more complex world behind the ordinariness, however. Like the girlfriend who is quarrelling with her daughter about her slow morning ritual, and the friend who has decided to have no children because he doesn’t want to pass on his worse characteristics. We mainly see the new generation sleeping peacefully in this film.