Na een overval waarbij hij zijn geheugen verliest, verlaat een man die wij leren kennen als ‘MP’ (Missing Person, gespeeld door de Ierse acteur Mark O’Halloran) zijn thuis en begint aan een reis. Tijdens zijn omzwervingen van land tot land en een serie van vreemde, verlichtende en soms komische ontmoetingen, verwerft MP nieuw inzicht in de complexiteit van gevoelens die aanwezig zijn in het Europa van de 21ste eeuw.

Directors statement.

Are we living at the end of an era?
History’s Future asks this question, and examines its possible meanings and possible answers, via the story of an amnesiac man’s odyssey through the contemporary West – a social landscape plunged into economic and philosophical crisis.
A complex and challenging cinematic venture, Fiona Tan’s History’s Future is a hybrid film – part fiction, part documentary and wholly exploration. It will be an attempt to examine the contemporary Western condition – with the film’s own multiple, protean form reflecting the fragmentary, ever-shifting state of what sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has called our ‘liquid times’.
History’s Future is at once narrative and essay – combining reportage, archive material and drama to tell the story of one man searching at once for himself and for the meaning (the past, and the possible future) of the world he inhabits.
The film is built around the quest of a man known only as MP – standing for ‘Missing Person’. Stripped of his memories by a traumatic and violent assault, MP refuses to accept the identity that he’s been told is his. Rejecting the consolations of a wife, a home and a stable identity, he sets out on a lonely voyage into an unknown world.
Attempting to find out who he is, forever in search of a lost identity that eludes him, MP discovers a complex, troubled world; he sees it as if for the first time, with the eyes of a beleaguered innocent.
But what seems a journey without hope in fact reveals possible new beginnings. The film may start with the notion that we’ve reached the end of an era, but through MP’s quest we learn that dead ends may lead to new beginnings. For a man with no history, there can only be a present – and beyond it, possible futures. If we are at the end of an era, what should we keep? What should we take with us and show to future generations? And if this is the end of a cinematic era, what may future films look like? This film will be Fiona Tan’s personal attempt to map some key features of the early twenty-first-century Zeitgeist – the moods, fears and hopes of contemporary Europeans and Westerners. The journey of protagonist MP is a personal search, but at the same time, a search for the answer to a question that concerns us all: What are these times we are living in?

Trailer

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