Coming out of the cinema yesterday, just after watching The Prince of Nanawa by Clarisa Navas, something in me was scratched open—a need that could only be tamed with me downloading Letterboxd and giving it five stars, one like, and a simple review; “la ternura hecha peli.”

For the past seven months I’ve been adapting to a different timing, the one of my home. What this entailed I had not understood until yesterday. Time—like presented in this documentary—has been difficult to digest. I suddenly found myself in the theater looking at a mirror, being slapped by it, then watching it shatter on the floor, still showing my reflection.

This story takes place between places; Nanawa and Clorinda, Paraguay and Argentina, Spanish and Guaraní , time passing and the need to document it. Navas not only depicts the protagonist’s life, she also gently blurs the frontiers within his existence. The tenderness with which time is approached, presented, is what lingered with me the most. It felt like a direct translation of what I have so uncomfortably been ignoring: nothing is ever one thing or another. Time is defined by one’s perception of the world. For nearly four hours I watched a child become a man and watched myself settle into something equally terrifying. Slowness. Or less speed.

So what does time entail now that I have been enlightened by such a sensitive view on it? The bridge that Ángel crosses in the first minutes of the film might be the closest anwse: time as an in-between, a place that purely belongs to itself. A moment that forces you to look at your feet, understand where you’re standing, and accept it. Time in the North of Argentina is so different than time in the capital, it is pierced by that perpetual liminality of not being one thing or the other—not being what people think of when they think of Argentinians. And in the case of this film, not being Paraguayan or Argentinian, but being both; not speaking Spanish or Guaraní, but speaking both; not running after time, but letting it move through you.

Perhaps that is what this movie handed to me so abruptly: permission to inhabit time, to stop resisting it, to stop trying to catch it, to let slowness touch me with ternura, to start seeing it around me.