Hilary Brougher puts a slyly literate spin on time travel in her potent debut, The Sticky Fingers of Time, a meditation on destiny and sexual politics.

The Sticky Fingers of Time is what journalist Tucker Harding calls the novel she begins in 1953 when she returns to Brooklyn from covering the H-bomb tests to find Isaac, her lover and editor, inexplicably missing. Ofelia, the mysterious beauty who's meantime materialized and won Tucker's heart, takes her mind off Isaac, but when she spots him on the street and tries to follow, she finds herself in 1996. Tailing Isaac leads Tucker to Drew, an East Village writer, and towards Sticky's notion of non-linear time as a pie: You can eat the slices in any order but you can't eat the same slice twice.

"The challenge was to make a movie that's not about special effects but the suspension of disbelief," says Brougher. "It's really an allegory about creative awakening."

Brougher, 28, started making Super-8 shorts at fourteen in hometown Woodstock, New York and graduated from New York's School of Visual Arts. She was wrestling with a complicated thriller, 10:30 Rosebud, she envisioned as her feature debut, and working as a script supervisor to pay the rent when she found her way to Good Machine two years ago. Brougher says Ted Hope was sympathetic to 10:30 but advised her to start smaller. "He suggested I write something I could reasonably get done by any means necessary," she says. The result was Sticky Fingers.

With Hope on hold Brougher spent a year revising Sticky with input from Good Machine head story editor Jean Castelli, an early champion and eventual executive producer. Together they and producer Isen Robbins raised sufficient cash to make it through production shooting Super-16mm. They also brought on seasoned producer Susan Stover. At what Brougher describes as the eleventh hour, Good Machine came on board as executive producers with post financing from an external source. Sticky should be done by March and all rights are available.

Cast: Terumi Matthews, Nicole Zaray, James Urbaniak, Thomas Pasley, Julie Anderson, Belinda Becker, Amanda Cole. Crew: Producers, Isen Robbins, Susan Stover; Executive Producers, Jean Castelli, Ted Hope, James Schamus; Screenwriter/Director, Hilary Brougher; Cinema-tographer, Ethan Mass; Production Designer, Teresa Mastropierro; Editor, Sabine Hoffman. Contact: Isen Robbins/Susan Stover, Sticky Films, c/o Good Machine, 526 W. 25th Street, New York, NY 10001. Tel: (212) 229-1046, Fax: (212) 255-4308.

(pi) - Darren Aronofsky
Floating - Meredith Cole
Liar - Josh Pate & Jonas Pate
Little City - Roberto Benabib
Louis and Frank - Alexandre Rockwell
Push - Jason Jennings
Remembering Mario - Val Franco
The Second Wife - Michael Steinberg
Shopping For Fangs - Quentin Lee & Justin Lin
The Sticky Fingers of Time - Hilary Brougher
Whatever - Susan Skoog