6:06
Drama • 2025 • 1h 30m
This movie was screened on 82. Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica 2025
Leo’s life unfolds in black and white. Every day begins precisely at 6:06. Drugs are not just an addiction for him, but a mental loop that keeps him locked in a perpetual déjà vu… until he meets Jo-Jo, an enigmatic girl with whom he sets off on a journey to Portugal.
Addiction is a form of desperate loyalty to what kills us.
— Marguerite Duras
Dawn marked by a precise time – 6:06 – becomes in this film the symbol of a suspended existence, imprisoned in a repetition that knows no variation. The life of Leo, a twenty-six-year-old lost in circular temporality, is consumed between survival jobs and the incessant call of the substance, which is not only a chemical addiction but the very paradigm of his thought: an eternal return that brings him back, with cruel punctuality, to the starting point. Every attempt at escape crashes against the relentless logic of beginning again.
Into his horizon enters Jo-Jo, a nomadic and dissonant figure, who speaks a foreign language and drives a caravan as if it were a body that allows her to stay alive. Not an anchor of salvation, but a detonator: bearer of an unhealed grief, of a void that consumes her, she becomes mirror and counterpoint to Leo’s abyss. In the collision of their traumas, an opening appears, an unprecedented language, a form of intimacy that does not redeem but fractures the scheme.
The journey toward Portugal – physical, but even more interior – is a drift along mysterious roads, crossed by dreamlike flashes and visions in which the identities of the two protagonists meet in a common language made of silences, wounds, and suspended moments. But the trajectory does not lead to linear salvation: Leo is forced to descend into his own hell, while Jo-Jo remains an evanescent figure, perhaps destined to dissolve, leaving behind only the trace of a passage. The race that unites them is at once promise and threat, tension toward a possible redemption that may, however, reveal itself as a new fall.
Director Tekla’s work is rooted in a personal and political necessity: to tell of pain, survival, and the search for another possibility. The choice to work with non-professional actors, coming from real and unmediated margins, produces a language we might define as raw, authentic, resistant to any consolatory aestheticization. Leo embodies a void that devours from within, while Jo-Jo is chaos incarnate, a destabilizing presence that never seeks to transform into salvation.
Its unstable light and the chromatic tones oscillating between dazzling and dark amplify the sensation of alienation, inscribing the bodies in landscapes that seem to waver between reality and hallucination. The image itself becomes a place of conflict, never a refuge: a torn surface where addiction finds its visual counterpart.
6:06 offers no redemption, nor any illusory comfort. Rather, it invites the viewer to remain in the rawest zones of existence, to look at pain and disorder without turning away. What emerges is not the promise of a happy ending, but the possibility of glimpsing, in the deepest fissures, an unexpected form of beauty.
The director, with twenty years of experience in social cinema and a biographical path marked by fall and rebirth, transforms her wound into an aesthetic and ethical device. The film is thus a collective pact, a gesture of resistance: testimony for a generation moving between disillusionment and a stubborn search for meaning.
It is not a matter of winning – 6:06 seems to remind us – but of learning to remain within conflict, of continuing to fight even knowing that each dawn may bring us back to the same point. The possibility of a second chance is not a guarantee, but a fragile opening, to be reconquered every day at 6:06.
And yet, within this frame, the work also bends toward the surreal, toward an imagery that draws on fluorescent dreams and visions that blur life and death, light and darkness, fall and resurrection. Addiction appears as a black hole, an unfillable void, that reflects the universal theme of existence and its end. In this dimension, the interrupted love of a daughter for her father, to be rediscovered or perhaps only imagined, reverberates like a submerged echo, adding further layers of meaning.
The film thus takes the form of an artistic-cinematic installation, creative and landscape-like: a road movie of the soul, in which growing up means crossing ruins and ghosts, clinging to bodies or memories knowing that such a gesture can save as much as it can condemn. The ashes of those once loved scatter in the majestic Ocean, as if nature itself were participating in a rite of dissolution and rebirth.
The tunnel, the coma, the return to new life: symbolic figures that emerge from the story as metaphors of transformation, open questions more than answers. Will this experience be enough to re-signify existence, to alter the irreducible enigma of one’s choices? 6:06 leaves the question suspended, reminding us that every resurrection remains fragile, and that the meaning of being is never definitive.
The void is not a flaw: it is the space where the soul expands or gets lost.
— Emil Cioran
