Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Olivier Assayas, the celebrated French director of “Clouds of Sils Maria” and “Irma Vep,” is making his Berlinale competition debut this year with “Suspended Time,” his most personal film to date.

Speaking to Variety ahead of the movie’s premiere at the Berlinale, Assayas says the film retells his experience during the lockdown and is based on his personal diary. “When I was writing this diary, I felt that despite my anxieties and doubts or fears, it was an idyllic period, to be confined in the countryside,” he says. “It was a time where we believed in a form of utopia and as soon as society got back in action, it dissolved.” Narrated by Assayas and woven with archival material, the comedy stars Vincent Macaigne as the director’s alter-ego, Paul, a well-known filmmaker who is confined with his music journalist brother Etienne (Micha Lescot) and their girlfriends Morgane (Nine d’Urso) and Carole (Nora Hamzawi), in their childhood home in the Normandy countryside over a sun-drenched spring. “Suspended Time” marks Assayas’ first film since 2018’s “Wasp Network,” a spy thriller starring Penélope Cruz and Edgar Ramirez, and his follow-up to “Irma Vep,” an A24-HBO limited series starring Alicia Vikander.

In “Suspended Time,” Assayas revisits the lockdown era with nostalgia and humor. “I had the impression of living something historic and I wanted to keep a record of it like David Hockney did in his painting ‘The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020,'” says Assayas, who cites Hockney many times in the movie.

Hockney was, in fact, confined near Assayas’ family home and depicted the blossoming of nature despite the lockdown in his painting.

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