Memory

Following her parents’ divorce, six-year-old Vladlena (the director herself) leaves Crimea to settle in Grozny, Chechnya, unaware that her life will soon be upended by war. The conflict profoundly transforms her city, endangers her family, injures her mother, and ultimately forces Vladlena to flee, and she becomes one of the many people displaced within Russia. Years later, now a filmmaker, she returns to these traumatic memories with a distinctive cinematic lens.

Rather than unfolding chronologically, Memory follows the surprising logic of recollection–and one marked by trauma. Images resurface, spark others, transform and reassemble in an original visual tapestry, preserving a child’s memories and a people’s history, both threatened with erasure.