Directors Statement:

KEEPING TIME is about a young Albanian ballroom dance teacher and three women he takes to Atlantic City for a dance competition. At first, I was drawn to the spectacle — the music, the costumes, the intensity of competition. But what fascinated me most was the strange world of intimacy at its center.

The relationship between a professional dancer and a client is built on touch, trust, attention and dependence. It can feel deeply personal, even profound. And yet it is also transactional. One person is paying the other to dance with them, to guide them, to hold them, to make them feel confident and seen. I became fascinated by that ambiguity — by the way something bought and paid for can still become emotionally real.

But the deeper I went into this world, the more the film seemed to be about something larger. For a few minutes on the dance floor, age, loneliness, money, background and ordinary life can fall away. Two people move together and enter a world suspended from everything outside it. There is a fleeting sense of transcendence — of becoming, for an instant, the person you want to be, or perhaps the person you once were.

And then the music stops.

In Atlantic City, that idea took on another dimension. Here was this fading American city, built around fantasy, glamour and reinvention, now showing its age — and inside it, these dancers chasing their own brief moments of transformation. The setting began to feel inseparable from the film.

Through Krisi and the women he dances with, KEEPING TIME became a film about loneliness and connection, but also about the desire to capture a fleeting moment — and then to recapture it before it disappears. About the bargains we make to feel seen, the people we need in order to feel less alone, and the dream that, for one dance at least, we might rise above the lives we have.