“A meditation on the effect of physical distance on emotional bonds and on our memories shaping an idealized past that perhaps never was.”

“The past, in a continuous future, is the fate of the people in the Middle East.”

Distance idealizes places, feelings, connections. Distance in space, distance in time. Distance creates longing for a past that may no longer exist except in our minds. Technology has improved and lowered the barriers of distance. But it can never fully replace the human embrace, that tender touch or look into another person’s eyes that conveys the world. In an ambiguous but tender story about exile, a self-imposed creation of distance that broke up a family out of necessity, Iranian filmmakers Morteza Ahmadvand and Firouzeh Khosrovani render the story of Maryam, a woman who over four decades ago slipped out of her country wrapped in a smelly sheepskin to escape a fate that struck some of her other young activist friends, but also separated her from her parents and the house that she grew up in.

Through the wonders of surveillance cameras and the help of some friends in Iran, Maryam managed to get a veritable army of peering eyes installed in that house, where her elderly parents live out their final days. Not to spy, but to somehow be closer to them and guard them. She watches her dad shuffle around the house behind his walker, or mom dancing in front of the camera. She can’t remember the last time she saw her parents dancing, but here we are. She sees them sleeping in separate beds, and longs for a moment to see them fall asleep in each other’s arms again. There’s a melancholy in her voice, a longing for a past that was happier, when they were still a family. Now, thousands of miles away living in the US, that past has gone.

But not everything in the past is a pleasant memory. Home videos of pre-revolution times show a happy child dancing around the house or playing in the small pool in their courtyard. But it also reminds her of childhood friends who are no more. Iran has known violence in its past, and the memories of that come through as well. The Iraq-Iran war came and set Tehran ablaze, and all Maryam could do was call home to see if the house was still standing. But every phone call answered meant that some other house in the city, her city, was destroyed. Ahmadvand and Khosrovani cleverly link to the present, with images of Tehran again under attack, this time from a different aggressor (Israel). The past is the future indeed, and always will be. History tends to repeat itself, certainly in this part of the world.

Past Future Continuous is a challenging film, make no mistake. The images of the house, its living room, the small kitchen, the bedrooms, the courtyard, are stitched together, often as frames in a collage. One or more will be replaced with the image of a small bird in a fish tank, desperately fluttering about in an effort to get out. This is the type of poetic symbolism that is the connective tissue of the film. No dialogue is spoken on camera, but the film is a conversation between Maryam and the house, which voices its longing for happier times, when Maryam herself was still fluttering about its confines. That little bird could escape those confines, but it left an empty tank. The film speaks several times about Mount Qaf, a metaphor for a distant and ideal place in Persian mythology, and the Simurgh, mythological and benevolent birds. Maryam tries to introduce an actual bird, a parrot, to break the silence that hangs around the house, and seeing the bird at times on top of its cage, oblivious to its freedom, is both symbolic and humorous.

But even though the film gives us moments of Maryam’s past, it provides too little background on both her and her family to create a true connection to the film and the story. Who is Maryam, truly? She is a faceless figure, a stand-in for the friends and family whose personal experiences with the distance created by exile inspired the film. Khosrovani’s previous film, 2020’s magnificent Radiograph of a Family, was also a story (her own family’s story) structured around forced separation by distance, but was better at drawing an emotional connection out of that. The imagery of Past Future Continuous, its oblique structure and its miserliness with providing details that could bring clarity to the reasons for this obliqueness, and the amalgamation of different experiences into a faceless character make the film a tough nut to crack. There is a tenderness to its tone, but it never crosses into being moving, becoming more a meditation on the effect of physical distance on emotional bonds and on our memories shaping an idealized past, a Mount Qaf if you will, that perhaps never was, or at least never was the full extent of our being. Those musings are the most affecting parts of Past Future Continuous, a film that will find its niche audiences at documentary festivals across the globe in an effort to connect through its universal themes and its message that one thing transcends space and time: love.