Marie Valentine Regan about the film:

My goal was always to use image and sound to respond to layers of Adnan’s presence and create an experience of her attention. In assembling my first timelines, I used an ink drawing of Adnan's beloved Mt. Tamalpais that she had given me as a model structure – the drawing’s peaks, variations and hollows shaping how I thought about the relation of Adnan’s in the footage, her works, and ideas.

Adnan being and time was created in close collaboration with Adnan during the last five years of her life. It depicts her, "without ego", immersed in her art and the world around her. Conversations arise about the density of time, life as thought, language as vibrations, exile as a secret longing. Attuned to the immediate “now,” like Adnan herself, the film explores the intimate interiors of her daily life and studio, as well as the vast landscapes that grounded her philosophical understanding.

Marie Valentine Regan is a filmmaker born in California and based in Paris. Her films exist at the intersection of documentary and experimental cinema, and she trained at the San Francisco Art Institute and Columbia University. Regan’s work has been shown and awarded at international festivals such as Zinebi Bilbao, São Paulo, Cinéma du Réel, as well as in museums including K20 Düsseldorf, KINDL (Berlin), Pera Museum (Istanbul), and the National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC). This is her first feature film. She has taught film for many years in New York at Bard College, Columbia, and Barnard, as well as in Paris, where she now lives.

Born in Beirut in 1925 to a Syrian-born officer in the Ottoman army and a Greek mother, Adnan was educated in French schools in Lebanon. She came to Paris to study philosophy and aesthetics at the Sorbonne, later doing advanced work in philosophy at Harvard University and UC Berkeley. California would be her base for more than 60 years. In California, during the Algerian War for Independence, Adnan stopped writing in French and turned to English for her anti-war poetry. She also began to paint, creating abstract works in vivid color, ink drawings, tapestries, and accordion-folded-paper books (leporellos).

In 2012, at the age of 87, Adnan, already a renowned poet, surged to increased international art world attention when she was 'discovered' by Documenta 13. Serpentine Gallery Artistic Director Hans Ulrich Obrist has called Adnan, 'one of the greatest artists of our time.' Since then, Adnan's work has received major solo shows at the Guggenheim, Serpentine Galleries, Centrum Paul Klee, K20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Institut du Monde Arabe, SFMOMA, Mass Moca, etc. Her work is held in the collections of major museums across the world.

Her writing (poetry, essays, novels and plays) is widely translated and taught, including her book-length poem, The Arab Apocalypse (translated to Norwegian by Gunstein Bakke) and her long-form essay, Journey to Mount Tamalpais. Her anti-war novel, Sitt Marie Rose, won the France-Pays Arabes award. In 2014, Adnan received the Ordre de Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, France's highest cultural honor. Adnan lived for many years between California and France with her partner, artist, writer, and translator Simone Fattal who also published many of Adnan's works through her Post-Apollo Press. Adnan is revered in the literary and art worlds, with people like Patti Smith, Eileen Myles, Robert Wilson (who appears briefly in the film) singing her praises.