Maleonn, the acclaimed Chinese conceptual artist and the son of the former director of the Shanghai Chinese Opera Theater, had wanted his latest project – Papa’s Time Machine, an autobiographical play told by life-sized puppets – to be a family affair. But the realities of his father’s quickly deteriorating health would soon throw his plans into disarray.

“I remember when I first decided to pursue a path in the fine arts my father joked about the whole family coming together to put on a play,” he says to the Guardian. “That was precisely my intention with [Papa’s Time Machine]. I wanted my father to direct. I was going to be the artistic director, and I wanted my mother to perform. But in the early planning stages, I called my father one morning to talk about our collaboration and he responded, ‘What play? I don’t remember any play.’”

The fragility of memory, the tension between fantasy and reality, and the family bonds forged in hardship and joy are tenderly interwoven in Our Time Machine, which won the award for best cinematography at last year’s Tribeca film festival. Co-directed by Yang Sun and S Leo Chiang, the documentary charts the evolution of Maleonn’s ambitious production while reflecting on the artist’s past and present relationship to his ageing father, who has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. In the play, the main character achieves what exists only in Maleonn’s wildest dreams: he builds a time machine so that his father, whose memory is also fading, can relive his happiest moments.

It’s a particularly significant proposition given the eventful, at times tragic, life led by Maleonn’s father, Ma Ke, who oversaw something close to 80 Peking opera productions throughout his directorial tenure. An early blackout period might explain this ardent devotion – he was one of the many artists persecuted during China’s devastating Cultural Revolution, and emerged from that traumatizing decade with a renewed commitment and enthusiasm for his craft. Surely this passion rubbed off on his son, yet Maleonn looks back on his youth with shades of resentment towards his absent, workaholic father: “When I was a kid I was incredibly angry with my father because he was always busy with his operas,” the artist solemnly reminisces, twirling his chin beard between his fingers.

With Chiang serving as translator, Maleonn describes how Papa’s Time Machine symbolically closes a rift between father and son. “Maybe he doesn’t even remember that he once wanted me to be a stage artist, but it’s something that stuck with me. When I found out about my father’s condition, it became urgent for me to have this connection with him.” The dreamy, warm nostalgia of the play certainly captures the paternal bond, but Maleonn was driven as much by the prospect of meaningfully collaborating with his father, and looking back at their shared memories, as he was motivated to bring the idea to life. Throughout the film, Maleonn struggles to involve his father in the production, but it soon becomes hard to ignore the discrepancy between his increasingly complex creative process, the play’s commercial demands, and Ma Ke’s incapacitation.

Papa’s Time Machine marks Maleonn’s first professional foray into the world of theater. The artist, known for his surreal, carefully staged photographs, some of which are enframed by red curtains and look like snapshots of fantastical theatrical productions, combines his unique sensibility and his affinity for the workings of the subconscious with elements of Chinese shadow puppetry. From this, a dazzling friction emerges between his familial legacy in traditional Chinese art and his own modern impulses. “A wealthy family might hire opera performers, but if you’re in a poor community and you can’t afford actors, you get puppets,” the artist explains.

But rather than miniature paper figurines behind a stretch of white cloth, Maleonn constructed puppets the size of actual humans, and placed them on stage with puppeteers dressed in all black. With its corroded copper aesthetic, and the exposed gears and pistons of its set design, the 90-minute show recalls the steampunk fantasias of science fiction writers like HG Wells or Jules Verne. Regarding his departure from the classical look, Maleonn shrugs: “I found the traditional Chinese aesthetic to be very limiting, so I just decided to do whatever made me happy.”

Through the film, audiences have the opportunity to observe up close the artistry of Maleonn’s intricate puppet design. “In a theater setting, no one is able to see just how complicated and well-crafted [the puppets] are,” Chiang explains. But the puppets aren’t the only things enriched by the privileged gaze of the camera. The creative touchstones and eventual staging of Papa’s Time Machine are interlaced with scenes from Maleonn’s personal life – his family’s struggles, his blooming romance with the production’s co-director, and his experience of becoming a father himself.

Maleonn was only beginning to construct his puppets when co-director Sun, who had recently graduated from film school, appeared in mid-2015 hoping to document the process (the more experienced Chiang joined the project down the road). Many of the film’s most intimate scenes – a whispered, tender conversation between father and son curled up next to nightlight, for instance – are single-handedly captured by Sun. “Initially [the play] was supposed to be more of a fairytale. But as [Maleonn’s] reality changed, the play’s story began to change. It became darker and weightier,” remembers the younger co-director, who preferred not to appear on camera due to bedhead.

“When my father first saw the play,” Maleonn recalls, “he said he loved it. But then he forgot he saw it a few hours later.” In the movie, the same thing happens when Ma Ke meets his granddaughter for the first time. There’s a deep sense of tragedy that underscores the film’s joyous concluding notes – the premiere of Papa’s Time Machine in March of 2018, and the birth of Maleonn’s son two months later. Yet Sun and Chiang convey the cyclical nature of existence with poignancy and grace, articulating how generational turnovers imperfectly but lovingly manifest through the lives of an artistic family. As for Maleonn, this multi-year experience may not have generated the collaborative experience he originally craved, but it did provide him with the invaluable ability to consider his childhood, and his father’s past distant behavior, in context.

“After [Papa’s Time Machine], I realized why my father was so busy,” he says. “The theater is a collaborative medium, it takes many more people to complete and you have to manage human relationships in addition to creating. A theater director is not just an artist, he’s also a leader.”

• Our Time Machine is now available digitally in the US with a UK date to be announced