The Prada ‘Past Forward’ film is a multi-platform collaboration between Miuccia Prada and American writer/director David O. Russell. Acclaimed for his films such as American Hustle, The Fighter, and Silver Linings Playbook, Russell imagined Past Forward as a “cinema poem,” a surreal, futuristic silent dreamscape with multiple actors replaying scenes in shifting combinations.

The result is an unreliable story, a parallax view wherein the scenarios, characters, costumes, genres, and endings, repeat and morph, refusing the logic of conventional narrative. Russell creates characters as elements of a complex collage, the viewer is left to decode what is experience, what is memory, what is dream, and discern the overlap and differences between them.

“It was completely what I wanted to do. It was so open that I didn’t think it was going to happen. Because nobody got paid or anything—it wasn’t like that. It was to do it just to do it,” he expressed. “I almost think the whole thing is almost a premonition of how the country feels right now to me. Because the movies that I love, the dreams that I love, have a feeling of uncertainty in them. You can still find love or locate yourself in them, but they’re tinged with a feeling of uncertainty.”

The film stars actors Allison Williams, John Krasinski, Freida Pinto, Jack Huston, Kuoth Wiel, Sinqua Walls, Connie Britton, Paula Patton, Thomas Matthews, Jason Sklar, Randy Sklar, Garry Clemmons, Jason Clemmons, and Sacha Baron Cohen.

Prada ‘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?