Memory
Documentary • 2025 • 1h 38m
This movie was screened on 82. Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica 2025
It explores memory as an unstable and tormented territory, where a childhood marked by war, loss, and family violence intertwines with collective history. Through images oscillating between documentary and cruel theatre — dismembered Barbie, Ken with an axe, King Kong clapping his hands, the drunken grandfather chasing the protagonist — the film presents trauma as a sensory and political experience. The universal dimension of memory and violence transforms personal testimony into a powerful allegory about childhood, survival, and a history that cannot be forgotten.
"In peace, children bury their fathers, while in war, it is the fathers who bury their children."
— Herodotus
— Herodotus
Sandu chooses to present a contemporary art installation that is both intimate and rigorous: it is an autobiographical documentary in which the narrative does not proceed linearly but through layers, returns, and echoes. Childhood under the fire of war, deportation, and displacement is represented with skillful use of voice-over, archival footage, and tableaux vivants that do not evoke but show trauma in a present that refuses to remain in the past.
The visual aesthetic is powerful, often trembling, with strong contrasts: light and shadow, heavy silences, sudden noises, colors that appear, vanish, and return like scars. The direction maintains a certain distance, but it is a distance that allows meticulous observation; every shot is chosen not only to show but to make the viewer feel — to perceive the distance between action and memory, between what happens and what remains.
Within this framework, the images gain the force of cruel theatre: the depiction of wartime violence takes shape in a disturbing tableau, with a Barbie in pieces and a Ken with an axe embedded in his head, surrounded by animals and children’s toys as in a stage play. Domestic interiors become scenes of brutality, with uncles beaten by soldiers “like in the movies”; endless queues for food transform into collective rituals; childhood sings opera, The Magic Flute, while King Kong claps his hands, in a surreal juxtaposition of innocence and horror.
At the center is memory as a place of conflict: memory that bears witness but also tortures; memory that demands truth but is contaminated by gaps, distortions, and temporal measures that do not coincide with ours. The film interrogates not only what to remember but how to remember: which voice, which perspective, which language remain faithful to the experience, and which betray it.
Family and social violence is inscribed through images oscillating between the dreamlike and the documentary: by name and surname, the granddaughter calls out to him — Mikhail Alexandrovich, the drunken grandfather chasing her with an axe, calling her “daughter of the devil”; the father, found after eight years, toothless, wrapped in a Lenin banner, wanted by the police; the poppy field, a place of play and crimson splendor shared with the father, charged with both idyll and wound.
There is also the maternal voice threading through memory as a constant admonition: “Whatever happens, don’t panic.”A voice that dissolves yet returns when the daughter finds a severed finger still wearing her mother’s ruby ring: a physical and symbolic residue of a loss that never closes.
The private subject (childhood, separation, loss) becomes a manifesto of the collective: war, roots, citizenship, fragmented identity. Sandu stages not only individual pain but pain as a historical, social, and political phenomenon.
There is also a tension toward healing, toward order — but an order that does not annihilate the wound; an order that coexists with the chaos of memories, discontinuity, and the intermittent self that does not always recognize itself. A moral force that does not display itself as redemption for its own sake but emerges from the very act of storytelling, from exposing what is intolerable.
Sandu’s direction stands out for stylistic coherence, linking visual and narrative fabric with precision, alternating moments of suspension and silence with images that speak more than words. The film does not merely inform: it offers an intense sensory experience, capable of engaging and shaking the viewer, suggesting that memory is something alive, unstable, and in constant flux. By bringing a personal story to light, Sandu highlights both its testimonial and political value, delineating collective responsibilities, shared memory, and the rights of often invisible subjects. The universality of the narrative transcends the private sphere, opening it to collective resonance without ever losing the power of intimate details. Its symbolic density and fragmentary construction invite the viewer to active and interpretative participation, transforming the act of watching into a critical and reflective exercise. Finally, the balance between aesthetic form and emotional truth allows the visual elaboration to amplify testimony rather than negate it, enabling trauma to find an artistic/cinematic language capable of conveying its complexity and persistence.
Memory is a work that asks the viewer not only to watch but to take a stance, to confront multiple truths. It is cinema of presence and absence that does not remain silent.
Accompanied by Bob Dylan’s Master of War, the finale brings this tension to a visual climax of extraordinary force: a sequence of archival photographs from different eras and geographies shows children worldwide immersed in contexts of war, inconceivably portrayed with weapons in hand. It is not merely a montage but a political and aesthetic act that expands the individual story into a universal allegory. The viewer is confronted with the unbearable evidence of violated childhood, of memory that belongs not to a single place but to humanity as a whole.
An unsettling and unusual film that manages to portray the wound as an integral part of identity, an inescapable piece of contemporary cinema representing war, childhood, exile, and historical memory in an absolutely, superbly artistic manner.
"The war will end / and the leaders will shake hands / and the old woman will continue begging on the streets / and the child who had collected the pieces of his body / will find nothing but stones to play with."
— Taha Muhammad Ali
— Taha Muhammad Ali
This movie was in the official competition of 82nd Venice International Film Festival 2025
