Illusions of grandeur

Spellbound by this seemingly crazy idea, Paulo invited his university classmate Lara Sendim to co-write the story. He wanted a female scriptwriter to develop the lead character of the nurse, to make her as convincing and identifiable as possible to the audience.

"I like to make movies with strong female roles. This story needs to be told through the eyes of a mother because it makes it much more powerful," he explains.

In the film, the nurse is married and has a lovely daughter. After she rescues the teenage boy, the timelines change and she wakes up to find that she is single and has no child. The desperate woman then tries to find her "missing" daughter by any means necessary.

To make the story more believable, Paulo turned to a local quantum physics professor to help him polish the sci-fi elements, including the scientific terms and the principles of time travel.

The director - who is considered by many Chinese fans as a master storyteller - interweaves real-world historic events into the plot, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Explaining the sequences as a metaphor to symbolize the changes in the protagonist's life, he says he tries to examine the uncertainty of life and the possibilities that would take place if people were given a second chance to make an important decision.