Memoria
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“The Film Is Full of Ghosts”: Diana Bustamante on Her DOC NYC-debuting Our Movie (Nuestra película)
Diana Bustamante’s Our Movie (Nuestra película) feels like both a departure and a homecoming for the Latin American producer credited on numerous Cannes winners, most recently Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Jury Prize-awarded (and Tilda Swinton-starring) Memoria. Comprised entirely of news footage from the Medellín-born Bustamante’s childhood—who grew up in the ’80s and ’90s when kidnappings, political assassinations and blood-soaked streets were as common as choir practice—the “essay documentary” is, as the producer/director puts it, “a collage of images, repetitions and memories, built through the intervention of the Colombian news archive.” And what a visceral collage it is—from closeups of bullet holes to a […]
by Lauren Wissot on Nov 14, 2022 -
Memoria Officially Begins U.S. Never-Ending Tour April 1
After a week in which there was some social media sniping over NEON’s seemingly stalled “never-ending tour” of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria, my personal #1 movie of 2022, the distributor has announced that distribution is not stalled at all. The previously announced tour, in which the film will travel from city to city, formally begins with New York’s IFC Center on April 1 and L.A.’s NuArt on April 8. Multiple cities now open each week, and the website includes dates stretching through October. From the press release: Director, Apichatpong Weerasethakul remarked on the plan, “For Memoria, cinema experience is crucial or maybe the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 10, 2022 -
In the Quiet Moments: The Memoria Sound Team of Akritchalerm Kalayanamitr, Richard Hocks and Javier Umpierrez
“When I work on sound for Joe’s films, it’s very similar to meditation,” says Akritchalerm Kalayanamitr, sound designer for all of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s work since Tropical Malady (2004), including his latest picture, Memoria. “I need to be super focused on every detail. Because it’s like meditating when you watch them, we need to mix the film in a kind of line”— here, on a Zoom call, he makes a slow, horizontal motion with his right hand—“so it’s not too much.” Despite the fact that sections of Memoria, which is about a Scottish woman in Colombia attempting to understand mysterious explosions […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 18, 2022 -
Echoes
What is a sound if only you can hear it? And if you heard such a sound, would you think it came from outside, somehow bypassing everyone else as it enters your brain? Or would you think it emanated from within, never escaping your own field of perception and thus becoming your own private mystery—or, as Memoria director Apichatpong Weerasethakul writes, your own “sonic companion?” The Cannes-premiering Memoria, starring Tilda Swinton and now in release from NEON, originated from the director’s musings about his own auditory disturbances, a series of enormous bangs that erupted in his sleep and would put […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 18, 2022 -
“…Even If the Wind Blows It Gives Us Something To Work With”: DP Sayombhu Mukdeeprom on Shooting Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria
Cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom is an impenetrable interviewee, shrugging off my most premeditated questions. I get it, how many ways can you talk about your creative process or the equipment you rented for a film? When I asked him what lights he used on Memoria, he named an Arri Skypanel and left the rest, “the usual,” to my imagination. As I learned from our talk on Suspiria, which he dialed into from his friend’s unruly wedding party via Skype, Sayombhu prefers flexibility, creating lighting environments that are open to how the director and actors react to them, each other, and the […]
by A.E. Hunt on Dec 27, 2021 -
My Job During a Pandemic: Launching a Film Publishing House
We’d been planning the launch of the publishing house for two years before the pandemic made a joke of all timelines and schedules. Our original idea was to inaugurate Fireflies Press in 2020 with the art book Memoria, a chronicle of the making of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s new film that exemplifies the creative forms of commentary we’re interested in exploring with the press. What better launching pad, we thought, than the film’s much-anticipated premiere at Cannes in May? On February 27, 2020, our designer and art director James Geoffrey Nunn flew to Berlin for what was supposed to be the start […]
by Annabel Brady-Brown and Giovanni Marchini Camia on Oct 11, 2021 -
Memoria, on the Collapse of Cinema (a Book Review)
Memoria Giovanni Marchini Camia and Annabel Brady-Brown, editors Fireflies Press, 2021 The book begins with the word “memoria” handwritten in gold on the blue cloth cover. The word appears again on the book’s first page, alone, black type on the white page, suggesting with its flourish of vowels a portmanteau of memory, history and cinema and calling to us from another language. “Memoria” is also the second word on the second page, just before the type slips into description: of glimmers, a window, boats, darkness, the cinema. There is a bang, a snap, and the snap of a picture, and […]
by Holly Willis on Sep 8, 2021 -
Cannes Film Festival 2021 Critic’s Notebook 5: Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Information, context and mystery have been on my mind quite a bit since seeing the two new films that Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul brought to this year’s Cannes: his feature-length, Tilda Swinton-starring, Colombia-set Memoria, and the 13-minute “Night Colonies,” the segment that concludes The Year of the Everlasting Storm omnibus project, which collects seven short films about creativity in the time of COVID-19 from global arthouse heavyweights such as Jafar Panahi, Dominga Sotomayor and David Lowery. This is partly because Weerasethakul’s new films, like the rest of his cinema, negotiate the divide between our sensory and cognitive functions better than […]
by Blake Williams on Jul 18, 2021
