Valley Time (a film review of Ian Darling's The Valley, 2026)

“Valley Time” is a peculiar pace of life. Such life is nonchalant, carefree, and at times delightfully indifferent. Adopted by the residents of the village of Kangaroo Valley (shy of 900 souls) strung along the meandering Kangaroo river, nestled amongst rocky sandstone cliffs. This secluded settlement sits a mere two-hour drive south of Sydney, in Australia. Throughout this silent landscape, distances stretch vast until the next neighbour. Community is bound not by proximity, but by a shared introspective state of mind. Such space is unique to the mountainous and isolated terrains. Such pace is unique to the insulated people living far apart yearning for each other. 

The documentary The Valley (2026) crafts a multifaceted, deeply evocative portrait of this remote enclave over the course of 3 hours. It shifts from one dairy farmer/painter to a gardener cultivating vegetables to a baker kneading dough to lonesome locals running errands… and so on, and so forth. A seamless human tapestry unfolds along the quiet succession of stationary shots with meticulous aesthetic composition. Also appearing in the line up are a carpenter, a policeman, firemen, a violin teacher, a yoga instructor, rugby players, a swimming pool lifeguard, canoe instructors… and much more. We later encounter the same recurrent protagonists, in different situations. What foremost strikes the spectator is the profound serenity of this perimeter where a blissful populace lives in uncomplicated harmony according to the whims of weather and Nature. 

The observational documentaries of Frederick Wiseman are the confessed inspirations for Ian Darling, the filmmaker of this film. For instance I could cite Belfast, Maine (1999) and Monrovia, Indiana (2018), the dutiful exploration of daily activities, both professional and cultural, that shape tight-knit communities. Or Aspen (1991) a mountainous playground where wealthy vacationers and labourers co-exist. Wiseman is a master at seizing the day with extensive footage, edited down to the very gist of what justly defines institutions, locale, humanity… 

I notice as well an acquaintance with other contemplative documentaries such as The Movement of Things (1985) by Manuela Serra, or more recently Direct Action (2024) by Guillaume Cailleau & Ben Russell and Good Valley Stories (2025) by José Luis Guerín. The latter explores the daily lives of migrants in a peripheral borough of Barcelona, giving voice to their life stories and history, with interviews and voice over. In a distinctly more languorous and poetical vein, Franco Piavoli has dedicated his life to capturing the contemplative pictures of his birthplace in rural Italy, through wordless imagery of bucolic scenery.

Ian Darling eschews interview or commentary within his film, and we barely hear the voices of his taciturn cohort. Instead, he opts for a silent contemplation of places and people, glanced at from a safe distance, akin to a fly on the wall, leaving the work of connecting the dots to the proactive spectator. The act of viewing amounts to absorbing these mundane images and fleeting vignettes, one after another, as a succession of clues and impressions. In this impressionistic endeavour, he shares a kinship with the methodology of Direct Action, where the everyday of a spontaneous community of activists forms a de facto makeshift society, depicted in long takes of their chores and struggles.

The shots aren’t as elongated as in your typical contemplative film here, yet Darling still unravels time like the spool of a kite. He circles around his subject, always from a static, poised point of view, revealing multiple angles and multiple scales, the distance incrementally closing in on a detail. Only seldom does a drone’s bird’s-eye view glide slowly across the luxuriant wilderness, offering a liberating contrast to the fixated viewpoints at ground level.

At the sight of the load of parcels dumped on the doorstep of this tiny post office in the morning, one gains a sense of the reclusiveness and thirst from these forsaken dwellers… Ordering en masse online has left local retailers, like the grocer, the butcher or the bookshop empty-handed, craving for the rare visitor. Nothing happens in this perfect town; the calm reigns and suffocates. An anniversary celebration for an elderly couple provides occasion at the community hall for a little role playing theatre, recounting the history of the European settlers first building this community. 

The aboriginal peoples are conspicuously out of the picture — an overwhelmingly white company — remaining only in one scene of initiation into their ancestral ritual dances, offered to a group of painted “tourists”. This blind spot of the film may be the lack of perspective belonging to the very insular community it describes so faithfully… Likewise, the youth is largely absent, amongst many grey haired heads. If there is any defect in this documentary it would be the lack of controversy within an ensemble of idealised portraitures without hierarchy.

The Valley is ultimately a film about the texture of time itself — how it pools and slows in remote places, shaping those who choose to inhabit them. Darling’s greatest achievement is his restraint: by refusing to explain or editorialise, he films frontally, but at a distance, the little habits and recurrent tasks of ordinary people. He compels the viewer to become an active participant, attuned to the rhythm of a life largely forgotten by the modernised world. The film stands as a quiet testimony to the power of contemplative cinema; its capacity to restore to the viewer a mode of attention that the information highway conspires to erode. The result is a film that works on its spectators much as the valley works on its inhabitants: gradually, almost imperceptibly, recalibrating one’s inner tempo until a powerful revelation. Stillness, rigorously observed and honestly rendered, is not the absence of cinema, but perhaps its purest expression dating back from the Lumière brothers' very own “animated photographic views”.

 The Valley (2026/Ian Darling/Australia) DOC

Premiere at the Sydney Film Festival on June the 7th 2026.