Cinema: memories that come to life
Connecting the Lebanon War to the present day, "Memory Box" is inspiring in its exploration of how memory artifacts can be treated in film.
The couple Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige are leading figures in Lebanese visual arts. They have an extensive resume encompassing fiction films, documentaries, video and photographic installations, sculptures, performance lectures, and writings. I have already discussed one of their films, Je Veux Voir, starring Catherine Deneuve, on my website-book Landscapes of the End (read hereSome of his many skills are showcased in the captivating feature film. Memory Box (Memory Box).
The work is inspired by – and sometimes directly uses – Joana's correspondence with a friend who left war-torn Lebanon for France in the 1980s. The material would only return to Joana's hands 25 years later. In this sense, the film is inspiring in terms of the inventive treatment that can be given to memory artifacts in cinema.
In the fictional story, Lebanese woman Maia (Rim Turki) lives with her daughter Alex (Paloma Vauthier) in Montreal. On Christmas Eve, they receive a box full of diaries, photos, texts, and letters that Maia exchanged with an old friend from Lebanon during the war, when they were teenagers. Maia hesitates to open the box, but her daughter insists, invading the privacy of the box and asking her mother to tell her what was buried in that past.
It is through Alex's clandestine research that we also begin to understand: a great friendship and a great love, someone involved with the guerrillas, an interrupted romance, exile. The most interesting thing is how this story unfolds through beautiful photo manipulations and diary insertions. Photos come to life, texts become film, memories become moving images. There are also very beautiful insertions of images of the young mother in war-torn Lebanon through graphic effects. The times communicate through a kind of tunnel, suggesting Alex's experience as he delves into his mother's past.
The film concludes in a rebuilt Beirut with a moving reunion, witnessed by the daughter, belonging to a generation for whom there is no longer room for secrets. But neither are there the prejudices and resentments that could have festered in past generations.
Without any fanfare, Memory Box It progressively builds up emotions and ultimately wins us over with a very feminine delicacy and insight.
>> Memory Box It's available on Amazon, Google Play, ClaroTV, Vivo Play, and AppleTV.
The trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4Z_ye5fXIg
* This is an opinion article, the responsibility of the author, and does not reflect the opinion of Brasil 247.