Drama deftly switches across generations and time to explore the traumas inflicted by the civil war
Like their previous cinema and gallery-based collaborations, this latest work by co-directors Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige (A Perfect Day, I Want to See) tackles the painful legacy of the civil war and ongoing troubles of their homeland
Lebanon. But while Memory Box playfully incorporates different media and filmic textures (8mm and 16mm footage, still photographs that turn into mini-animations, and the like) into its story, as did the co-directors’ earlier work, ultimately it is an eminently accessible feature film about three generations living through intense trauma and coming out the other side, mostly intact. That hopeful note resonates with a literal brightness as the last images capture the sun rising over Beirut, the raggedly indomitable city at the centre of the story and is effectively another character here.
The action properly starts in the present day in Montreal where teenager Alex (Paloma Vauthier) lives with her mother Maia (Rim Turki) and grandmother Teta (Clemence Sabbagh). One snowy
Christmas Eve, a huge box of journals, notebooks, cassette tapes and photographs arrives from
France, all memorabilia that Maia sent from Beirut to her friend Liza in
Paris while the Lebanese civil war of the 1980s was raging. (Some of the contents belonged originally to Hadjithomas.)