Past Forward, is the new multi-platform project by Director David O. Russell and Miuccia Prada, that was created as a “cinema poem.”
The surreal, futuristic silent dreamscape stars actors Allison Williams, Freida Pinto, Kuoth Wiel, John Krasinski, Jack Huston, and Sinqua Walls, replaying scenes in shifting combinations. The result is a complex collage wherein the scenarios, characters, costumes, genres, and endings, repeat and morph, refusing the logic of conventional narrative.
Earlier in the week, at Hauser, Wirth and Schimmel, Prada held the worldwide premiere of the short film. Subsequent screenings were held in Tokyo, Shanghai, Berlin, London, Milan, Paris, Moscow, Istanbul and Sydney.
Watch the full film at prada.com
A note from David O. Russell:
This cinematic experiment was born of a dinner conversation with Miuccia Prada many months ago. The conversation centered on an artist she was visiting in New York City. She related that he believed that in the future we will take a pill that would allow us to experience all media at exactly the same time, in one moment. I said that sounded either like a dream, or a seizure.
This, in turn, moved to a conversation about the nature of time, and how many selves or experiences one inhabits, and where beauty lives — in memories, sounds, fragments of old movies, paintings — layers of time, layers of identity, layers of memory, the future as imagined or lived in a movie or in life. This led to thinking about this project, and what could be created or expressed: a series of raw ideas. What cinema is, what memory is, what life is, what dreams are these are all related.
Past Forward exists in multiple, interchangeable iterations as a visual and narrative experiment. Whose story is it? Is it the story a woman saw on the TV in her apartment, or is it her own memory, or is it her fantasy, or is it a dream, or is it possible for it to be all of these things?
