Film Forum

An inventive multi-media, multi-generational drama that toggles between 1983 war-torn Beirut and present-day Montreal. A teenage girl intercepts a mysterious package addressed to her mother. Defying her grandmother’s protective instincts and determined to break through her mother’s secrecy and stoicism, she surreptitiously immerses herself in the box's contents. Her mother's scrapbooks, letters, and audio recordings from her own heady youth, vibrant with romantic euphoria, political happenings, and familial despair, fill the young girl's imagination and spark her need to know more about her historical-emotional lineage. The story processes media of the past via modes of the present: emoji-filled texts, emails, and smartphone snapshots.

Directors Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige are known not only for their film work – THE LEBANESE ROCKET SOCIETY, A PERFECT DAY, and JE VEUX VOIR (featuring Catherine Deneuve and Rabih Mroué) – but for their art installations and long-term research based on personal or political documents, with particular interest in “hidden histories.” Among their major artworks, Circle of Confusion (1997), Lasting Images (2003), The Lebanese Rocket Society (2011), SCAMS (2014), I Stared at Beauty So Much (2016), and Uncomformities (2017), showcased at the Centre George Pompidou (Paris) and awarded the prestigious Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2017. They have presented their works in solo exhibitions at Beirut Exhibition Center (Beirut), Haus der Kunst (Munich), HOME (Manchester), IVAM (Valencia), Jeu de Paume (Paris), MIT List Visual Arts Center (Cambridge), Museum of Modern Art (Paris), Powerplant (Toronto), Sharjah Art Foundation (UAE), and Villa Arson (Nice), as well as group exhibitions in museums and art centers around the world.

2021        102 MIN.        FRANCE / LEBANON       PLAYTIME
IN FRENCH, ENGLISH, AND ARABIC WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES

Reviews

"An intoxicating cocktail of recollections...and an ingenious blend of image and music…that allow our own experience to empathetically blend with those of the characters
in a mix of imagination and reality."
– Jay Weissberg, Variety

“Deals in the ephemeral and contains the same compassion, curiosity and joyful invention found in Agnes Varda’s body of work. Throughout their careers as photographers and filmmakers, Hadjithomas and partner Joreige have documented forgotten histories. Here, they inventively embrace digital, print and analogue media to reflect the underpinning of history and the power and beauty of archived material seen by new eyes.”
– Katherine McLaughlin, Sight + Sound

“An eminently accessible feature film about three generations living through intense trauma and coming out the other side. A film with a deep reservoir of empathy for all its characters. Edited with minute attentiveness. Outstanding performances from the whole ensemble.”
– Leslie Felperin, The Guardian 

“The first film in nine years from the award-winning team of Joana Hadijthomas and Khalil Joreige, whose work  has ranged freely over feature films, docs, installations and performance art. MEMORY BOX shows the sophisticated modernity of their artistic approach. An extremely dense fusion of elements that make up our sense of time and memories, including collages of hundreds of old photos, grainy super 8 footage, notebooks, songs and music, sound bites and newspaper articles.”
– Deborah Young, The Hollywood Reporter