director’s statement

I was five years old when my family left Iran and landed in a Scarborough motel room, where we waited for asylum papers while the Iran–Iraq war ended without us. I don't remember the war. I remember the television.

That's the point. For a child, war doesn't arrive as history — it arrives as atmosphere: the tone of the adults, the hum of a screen, a calm voice explaining faraway events in a language you're just learning to love. I was raised, in part, by the broadcast voice of the country that both sheltered my family and helped author our displacement. The summer we arrived, a US Navy cruiser shot down Iran Air 655 — two hundred and ninety people, sixty-six of them children. On our motel TV, it was regrettable, necessary, closed. The lie was never in the words. It was in what got left out.

I built the film from the actual room. The motel still stands on Kingston Road, and we scanned it — photogrammetry, LiDAR, Gaussian splatting — with my own family performing as volumetric video inside the reconstruction. The same child plays both my past self and my son, because that is the film's argument in a single body: the loop is real, the voice is still speaking. Memory here glitches and refuses to resolve — not as style, but because that's what displaced memory does.

I finished this film the year the country of my birth and the country of my life went to war again. The film wasn't made for this moment; the moment caught up to it.

One principle guided everything: no stories about us without us. The film ends on the first faces you'll see in it — my family, looking straight at the camera. We spent forty years as the background of someone else's story. The portrait is what it looks like when we stop.