SYNOPSIS. 

In the northern town of Daymyr, where the summer sun never sets, life turns on a single clock. ZEIT - a great tower forged, the town's myth says, from the lance of a divine battle, its heart the pierced heart of a murdered moon - is the only measure of time in a land of endless day, telling Daymyr when to wake, when to work, when to sleep.

 

Then Zeit stops. And time stops with it. No one can agree when to eat or gather - and, stranger, nothing can finish. A sneeze will not release, bread will not rise, a woman's labor will not deliver. The whole town is caught at the threshold of its unfinished life.

 

The stoppage lays bare each soul's private relationship with time - and each of them, it turns out, lives anywhere but now. ARNE, the beloved mayor, has just been told his heart is failing; the stopped clock has quietly suspended his own death, and he will do anything - always as the town's most devoted servant - to keep it silent. FRAU, the perfectionist directing the town's sacred play, clings to her metronome, certain beauty is impossible without perfect time. MAGNUS, a tireless entrepreneur, turns the crisis to profit, selling darkness and remedies to his frightened neighbors while missing the daughter in front of him.

 

Only EINO, the town's timekeeper, is sent for a cure - to IDUNN, a woman who abandoned mechanical time long ago. When his calculations fail him, he must find his way by instinct instead, and Idunn shows him what he cannot measure: Zeit is not broken. It is waiting for the town to remember a rhythm it has forgotten. She sends him home with a single flower petal.

 

For the town is beginning to remember. As the players stop reciting their myth and start truly living it, the clock stirs - a chime no one hears, because to hear it you would have to stop being present - and the aurora, unseen for a thousand years, flickers back above them. It all turns on the midsummer performance, where Arne, playing the sun god who could not bear to share his sky, is slowly consumed by the role - until it is no longer clear where the mayor ends and the god begins, and the town must choose between the safety of measured time and the terrifying, luminous risk of the present.

 

ZEIT is a fable for anyone who has measured a life instead of living it: a warm, strange, funny film about a town that had to lose time to find it, and one man who gives up his last hours so everyone else can have theirs.