Displaced in Time - میان مرزهای تصویر

"Displaced in Time" is a song of memory and rupture, an ode to what we carry and what we leave behind. This film began as an attempt to understand the fractures of my family’s story—fragmented across lands and decades, where the notion of “home” is both a whisper and an ache. This is the story of our diasporic journey, but it is also the story of anyone who has ever stood on unfamiliar soil, gazing back at something they can no longer touch.
We drift between worlds: grainy Hi8 footage of childhood in Japan, Nowruz rituals woven together across screens, memories of long-lost rooms that linger only in dreams. With each cut, we piece together fragments of a life pulled by the tides of history, a life in which place and time resist the permanence we so crave. The family is in Japan, in Iran, in Germany, in Italy, never truly rooted, always shadowed by an invisible line that cannot be crossed.
And then there is my mother’s voice—clear and defiant, an outlawed voice that rises. Her singing, forbidden in her homeland, is an act of resilience, a thread between the seen and the unseen, past and present. Through her voice, I find a compass, a way of grounding myself in this liminal space, even as the currents of history carry us forward. Her song is memory given flesh, a hymn to the unseen homeland we carry within us.
The Angel of History, Benjamin’s vision, looms over our narrative—a being tethered to the wreckage of the past, looking back even as it is thrust forward. We, too, are caught in this push and pull, our gazes fixed on the memories scattered behind us, while an uncertain future pulls us further away. The storm of time propels us, yet we turn back to salvage what we can from the ruins. It is in these ruins that we meet, within the fragile borders of images and shadows, in the spaces between languages and lands, in moments that will never fully belong to us.
"Displaced in Time" is not merely a story of exile; it is a reflection on how displacement shapes the very fabric of time, making it elastic, suspended, unreachable. It is a place where absence speaks louder than presence, and home becomes a flickering memory. This film is my attempt to weave together the scattered threads of our existence—to hold, for a fleeting moment, the faces, voices, and songs that history tries to erase.
In this film, we find each other on borrowed soil, in spaces neither here nor there, in a world where belonging is not a place but a memory we carry forward.