Touching Time is a practice-led research film that investigates how feminist cinematic form can transform the representation of women's everyday labour into a process of artistic creation.
Women's domestic labour — cooking, cleaning, tending — has been historically excluded from the category of creation. Philosophy ranks repetitive maintenance as the lowest form of human activity, producing nothing that endures. Within cinema, auteur theory reinforces a parallel hierarchy by locating authorship in the singular creative vision of the director, systematically excluding women's contributions. Yet cinema also offers formal means to undo these hierarchies. The 'process genre' reveals how the depiction of labour can produce wonder and recognition of its transformative potential. The 'redistribution of the sensible' describes cinema's capacity to reconfigure what can be seen, felt, and valued as art.
This film converges two strategies from feminist cinema: haptic visuality, which keeps the camera close to hands and surfaces so that seeing becomes touching; and durational mundanity, which holds each task in extended time. It traces three women — a painter, a housewife, and a gardener — attending to each with the same cinematic care. The gestural similarity between artistic, domestic, and manual labour becomes felt in the viewer's body — and the hierarchy becomes impossible to sustain.