Three sisters, a summer in Tuscany, and the quiet question of what remains of a shared past when life has already moved on.
In How Long Is Now, Slovak writer-director Adriána Ingeli considers the passage of time not as a visible transformation, but as an almost imperceptible force reshaping relationships, memories, and identities.
Shot on 16mm film, the atmospheric short follows three sisters through a long, languid summer in Tuscany. At their grandmother’s home, a place deeply connected to their childhood, time appears to pause. Yet it is precisely here that the growing distance between their shared past and their present lives becomes palpable.
Between closeness and distance
The sisters’ conversations drift towards memory, while much of what occupies them today remains unspoken. Familiarity and distance exist side by side. Their childhood still connects them, yet it also becomes an image in which the relationship they once shared seems frozen in time.
“Sometimes the only bridge left is a shared past.”
Through gentle dialogue and extended moments of silence, How Long Is Now explores how nostalgia can create intimacy while making it difficult to encounter one another anew in the present.
The expectations of time
At the heart of the film is a woman approaching thirty. Quietly, she wrestles with the expectations attached to this stage of life: the assumption that she should already have a partner, a family, and a clearly defined path.
Ingeli approaches this tension without dramatic gestures. Instead, she observes the unease that emerges when an individual life does not correspond with society’s imagined timeline. The film asks whether holding on to earlier versions of ourselves prevents us from fully inhabiting the present – and whether relationships can continue to evolve as the people within them change.
How Long Is Now is a tender, bittersweet reflection on sisterhood, memory, and the inevitable movement of time.
