Memory Box

Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige's 2021 film follows Maia and her teenage daughter Alex in Montreal. On Christmas Eve a package arrives: notebooks, tapes and photographs Maia sent from Beirut, between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, to her closest friend who had left for Paris. Maia refuses to open the box; her daughter opens it. The film runs two times side by side. Beirut in the eighties appears as a teenager's daily life during the civil war: music, love, school and shelling in the background. Alex reads that material with today's eyes and meets a person her mother never described. The directors come from a visual art practice and it shows: photographs are set in motion, notebook pages are animated on screen, audio recordings are layered. Part of the material comes from the directors' own archive. Who it's for: viewers who like films built on memory, archive and migration. Who it's not for: viewers wanting a historical account of the Lebanese civil war; the film shows only as much of it as a teenager's diary holds.