MEMORY | Память

FRANCE, NETHERLANDS | 2025 | COLOR | DCP | 98’ | RUSSIAN

If Sergei Parajanov (“Sayat Nova”) lived, he would certainly have signed this one. Not that the director of this amazing debut does not have her own voice. The opposite. Having a definite understanding of the philosophy and the aesthetic of the legendary Armenian auteur for a genuinely poetic cinema where the narrative becomes a dreamscape, a torrent of sound and visions, her film is an apotheosis of cinema and simultaneously a pioneering way to testify a personal history of ecumenical dimensions. Because as Sandu recounts her childhood in the early 1990s, while the First Russian-Chechen War rages around her, her tragic experience is reflected in the stories of countless other children around the world who have been and continue to be violently deprived of their innocence. With dazzling shots that spread across the screen like living paintings, Sandu captures her film as a mosaic of fragmented memories and paradoxical audiovisual compositions, echoing the psychologically complex mechanism by which a girl invokes her imagination to protect herself from the absurdity and brutality of the adult world. An almighty anti-war statement about a never-ending cycle of violence, “Memory” is marked by a stunning directorial talent and is one of the best debuts of recent years. L.K.

DIRECTOR: Vladlena Sandu
SCREENWRITER: Vladlena Sandu
DoP: Lisa Popova
EDITOR: Vladlena Sandu
PRINCIPAL CAST: Amina Taisumova, Selima Agamirzaeva, Vladlena Sandu

VLADLENA SANDU
She was born in Crimea, Ukraine (then USSR), in 1982. In 2011, she graduated from the Rodchenko Art School. In 2016, she graduated from the VGIK, in the field of film directing. In 2019, she completed Boris Yukhananov’s Studio of Theater Direction. Since the invasion in Ukraine she is based in Amsterdam. This is her feature film debut.

FILMOGRAPHY
2025 Memory