‘Memory’ review: Ukrainian filmmaker Vladlena Sandu explores her troubled past in lyrical docudrama

Dir/scr: Vladlena Sandu. France/Netherlands. 2025. 98mins

Lyrical hybrid documentary Reminiscence permits Ukranian filmmaker Vladlena Sandu to revisit key experiences from her childhood and household historical past. The therapeutic worth lies in recognising how trauma turns into a unending cycle because it passes from technology to technology. Half autobiography, half set up, the movie provides a placing perception into Sandu’s youth in Crimea and Chechnya following the collapse of the Soviet Union within the Nineteen Nineties. Festivals ought to reply to a poetic, extremely private work following its world premiere because the opening presentation of Venice’s Giornate degli Autori strand.

A poetic, extremely private work

Within the opening credit, Sandu provides her because of an inventory of filmmakers that features Tarkovsky, Pasolini and Parajanov, and there are echoes of their work all through Reminiscence. Sandu supplies a wealth of helpful context, explaining in voice-over that “this movie serves as an act of acknowledging my previous.” Born within the ’Autonomous Republic of Crimea, Ukraine, USSR’, she strikes to Grozny within the Chechen Republic after her mother and father divorce. Raised by her grandparents, she lives in an impartial Chechnya as Russia begins its 10 12 months battle towards its residents.

Hers is a childhood each strange and extraordinary, evoked in scenes the place her cool, matter-of-fact narration is matched by heat dramatisations wherein Amina Taisumova performs the younger, sad-eyed Vladlena. The lady makes a brand new residence, attends faculty, has her hair braided and discovers the magic of the Rainbow Cinema the place King Kong turns into a selected favorite. A person in a gorilla swimsuit turns into a recurring determine, assuming the mantle of her imaginary pal and protector. Pink is a dominant color all through, Lenin a relentless presence and punishment is a primary resort within the face of disobedience or the tendency to favour her left hand when writing.

At residence, Vladlena faces the reproaches of a stern grandfather, and by no means understands the occasions which have made him the person he has change into. Vladlena’s personal trauma turns into obvious in the best way she performs and interacts; her drawings function scary monsters, and when she performs with dolls it’s to decapitate and dismember them.

Sandu continuously illustrates the best way play supplies a window into the thoughts of the kid. Scenes are staged with dolls and puppets in makeshift toy theatres. Tableaux present how she responds to battle and loss. Eclectic music decisions run from pop tracks to a model of The Blue Danube and, because the battle in Chechnya takes maintain, the soundtrack is marked by the whistle of passing bullets or the noise of loud explosions. In voice-over, Sandy calmly remembers the blood on the pavements and the our bodies within the streets. 

Sandu does mine extra light moments from her recollections, corresponding to working by way of fields of blood crimson poppies and taking part in on the seashore, however it’s the on a regular basis horrors that appear to outline her – an uncle who’s overwhelmed to dying, the 5km stroll for consuming water, the meals rationing and a way that historical past is all the time written by the victors. There’s a kaleidoscopic combine of stories experiences, archive materials and household images that seize her previous, and the connecting tissue is all the time trauma.

There are factors wherein Sandu provides extra particulars on the lifetime of her grandfather Mikhail, who served within the Second World Conflict and of her father Oleg, who turns into a needed prison. Their experiences have been handed down each consciously and unconsciously, leaving Sandu to contemplate how the cycle may be damaged within the first of what she claims will likely be a part of a tetralogy primarily based on her life experiences.