“A work of unbridled ingenuity and unrelenting intimacy.”

In a world where many artistic representations of war can be reduced to the sentiment that any kind of conflict is inherently negative and serves no purpose other than promoting division and violence, we find that there is a seemingly never-ending supply of artworks that set out to examine it from various angles. They do this through dissecting the nuances of war in an attempt to understand the motivations behind certain conflicts. Often those works derived from firsthand accounts or made by people who have experienced it themselves tend to have the most significant impact, particularly when exploring a subject that is both deeply personal and broadly relevant. This was clearly the starting point for Vladlena Sandu as she set out to make her impressive directorial debut with Memory, a sprawling existential epic in which she explores her childhood in the war-torn city of Grozny, where she witnessed the violence and despair caused by the war between forces from her native Chechnya and Russia. The conflict saw many of her relatives, friends and members of the close-knit community perish, and their story is told in the form of an astonishing blend of images and sounds, offering reflections on this violent chapter in European history. A project that took several years to develop, intricately handcrafted by a filmmaker whose extraordinary skill is matched only by her willingness to bare her soul by exploring the past, Memory is an immense achievement. It’s a complex provocation of both form and content that sees Sandu immediately establishing herself as an essential voice in contemporary non-fiction filmmaking, as well as highlighting her masterful command of the craft in terms of visual and tonal composition.

War is rarely easy to discuss, and we often find that the more personal a work is, the more harrowing it becomes, especially when working with true stories. This is not a comfortable film by any means, and Sandu is not at all interested in softening the blow when it comes to the reality that she and countless others faced during the Chechen Wars, which stretched over more than a decade and were responsible for over a hundred thousand casualties across both the military and civilian populations. Yet this film is told from the perspective of one of the survivors, and Sandu insists on alleviating herself of the burden of having been fortunate enough to make it through the violent conflict – although the psychological scars she bears are distressing to witness in her steadfast, honest testimony. Many have attempted the Sisyphean task of revisiting the past, which tends to be a daunting process. Some would assume simply surviving is enough, and that sparing any additional thought to the past would just add further distress and discomfort. Yet, Sandu faces her personal history with nothing but honesty and the inherent desire to tell her story, even if she is aware that the specifics of what she experienced are not going to resonate with the wider audience. Memory is about the ways in which we balance the unbearable weight of the past, attempting to reflect on our experiences, making sense of the absurdity of existence, which the director delivers through carefully curated collages, pieced together from painful recollections that she is brave enough to not only confront, but recreate in a creative and truly provocative manner. 

If we are to describe Memory, it would likely be as an existential collage in terms of how it handles its ideas. Therefore, it only makes sense to extend the same approach to looking at the form the film takes, which is difficult to describe in traditional terms. The film consists primarily of fragments of the director’s memories, and she adopts a set of stylistic details that reflect this approach – there are recreations of her childhood, where she and a few other figures from her past are portrayed by actors as they attempt to reconstruct the war in more literal ways.  This is coupled with more abstract segments, such as surreal interludes that return throughout the film, and involve puppets and animation. There are recurring motifs that are initially quite difficult to interpret but ultimately come to define the director’s unique approach to examining the past. There is a theatricality to this film, and one might imagine that this would feel somewhat inappropriate considering the grave nature of the subject matter. However, there is a catharsis in escaping to versions of reality where chaos reigns and nothing quite makes sense, since this is oddly where the most harrowing truths reside. The unconventional nature of the film – which is more appropriately described as a long-form multimedia collage consisting of vibrant, unforgettable images – only further underlines the complexities that simmer beneath the surface of this project, a handcrafted experiential odyssey in which the director takes common tropes associated with both war documentaries and coming-of-age films, and crafts something incredibly compelling and deeply meaningful.

Attempting to understand every historical reference or artistic allusion in Memory is impossible – this is a work that doesn’t strive to make the experience easy for the viewer, but rather immerses us in a state of deep contemplation, allowing us to peer into the life of the director as she regales us with this poetic, complex meditation on a childhood lost to war, forcing us to take each moment as delivered without attempting to assert meaning on every element. It seems that with this film Sandu essentially managed to rewrite the cinematic lexicon by taking an already daring concept and developing it into something entirely unorthodox and unique, a work of unbridled ingenuity and unrelenting intimacy. There are several compositions in this film that are bound to become indelible, with both the striking nature of these images and the meaning they represent lingering with the viewer long after the film has ended. All of this ultimately evolves into a thought-provoking exploration of war, filtered through the memories of someone who witnessed these events as a child, piecing together what she remembers and combining these recollections with abstract excursions into her mind as she endeavours to construct a personal mythology of her own past, attempting to both make sense of these events, as well as work through her personal existential quandaries in the process. Hypnotic, challenging and never anything less than unforgettable, Memory is a staggering achievement, and one of the most ambitious, daring projects of the past decade.