Memory

Visually imaginative and richly symbolic, this filmic collage recalls the writer/director’s own childhood in Chechnya, where she witnessed the atrocities of war firsthand.

In the late 1980s, six-year-old Vladlena Sandu was sent from Crimea to Grozny, Chechnya, to live with her grandparents. Little did she, or her family, know that the horrors of war would be right on their doorstep over the following decades through the fall of the Soviet Union and the ensuing Russo-Chechen Wars. In this poetic, autobiographical hybrid documentary, Sandu revisits her traumatic childhood memories, confronting the ways in which geopolitical conflict impacts children, and asking what can be done to break these generational cycles of violence.

The influence of Andrei Tarkovsky, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Sergei Parajanov looms large in the evocative and lyrical imagery that makes up Memory, which incorporates live-action re-enactment, puppetry, animation, archival material and surreal vignettes shot on 16mm film. Nevertheless, this staggering, unique cinematic tapestry is thoroughly Sandu’s own. Depicting her tumultuous past with breathtaking intimacy and artistry, she also bears singular witness to the children whose lives are being threatened today by wars and conflict the world over.

“As a poetic, deeply cinematic recollection of [a] turbulent era, told in densely allusive imagery … Memory is already powerful. But as an evocation of all we lose to conflict … it is extraordinary.” – Variety