A keepsake box appears on a family’s doorstep on Christmas Day. Filled with notebooks, photos and recordings, it contains the past of Alex’s mother, who is not interested in it. For her part, the teenager discovers with great interest a part of her mother’s unknown life… as well as well-kept secrets.
Posted yesterday at 8:30 a.m.
Montreal, in the present: armed with her cell phone, Alex, a teenager, shoots old notebooks of memories strewn with photos yellowed by time and the Lebanese sun.
These photos, which date from the 1980s, show another teenager, her mother, Maia (Rim Turki), surrounded by her own group of friends: distant little joys and smiles that display a relative carelessness despite the civil war which then tears their country. The digital images of these silver photos, Alex shares them with a handful of friends as connected as her, and whose immediate reactions fuse on social networks.
Alex (Paloma Vauthier) then rediscovers his mother, a woman full of gray areas and secrets about her past, and thus reconnects with her roots through these hitherto unknown notebooks, which appeared at the door of the family home on the day of Christmas, in a big cardboard box – hence the title of the film, Memory Box.
The surprise box also contains several old audio cassettes recorded by Maia at the same time, which allows her Lebanese past to be told orally, in a fluid way. Maia’s life story will only be delivered in snippets, as Alex “steals” reading moments. Her elders do not want her to consult the notebooks, without the viewer knowing why, while perceiving their anguish very well.
mise en abyme
Then, the digital images that Alex has taken in bursts will merge and create their own “film within the film”, while the paper photos, initially static, will come to life to also participate in the strange setting. en abyme which makes all the charm and a large part of the interest of Memory Boxa Franco-Canadian-Lebanese co-production in which Micro_scope took part, in Quebec.
With this film, the director couple, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, continue to do what they have always loved to do: play with narration and image codes by interweaving media (here, photography).
Memory Box, a story of reappropriation of the past served against a backdrop of immigration, exile and secrets, offers a fine and subtle score, if not hectic. A beautiful cinematographic object, both modern (in its formal approach) and retro (in its rhythm), lively, and nourished by a nostalgic musical score that will particularly appeal to those who lived through the 1980s.
A film that we suggest watching as a family, with one or more teenagers, and which could start some nice intergenerational conversations.
Indoors
Drama
Memory Box
Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige
Rim Turki, Manal Issa, Paloma Vauthier
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