AMINA TAISUMOVA IN MEMORY

VLADLENA SANDU: MEMORY (2025) - NEW DIRECTORS/NEW FILMS 2026

Phantasmagoric grimness of a girl's life in 1990s Chechnya transformed into therapeutic art

"Memory" means nothing less than the filmmaker's own memory, of a very hard growing up following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s in Ukraine and Chechnya, with a cruel grandfather, Mikhail Alexandrovich, and an absent father Oleg who turns out to have been an opium addict and is rarely seen, because he is a criminal in flight from the law. The filmmaker, whose colorful portmanteau name (a girl's name made by combining "Vladimir" and "Lenin") Mikhail Alexandrovich calls stupid, narrates her own story, but with the on-screen detachment and dazzlement of the filmmaker's intense, colorful collage of often found images to illustrate her early life and turn it into a funny-grim fairy tale that grows right out of a child's storybooks and a girls's large chalk drawings on the wall.

Born in the ’Autonomous Republic of Crimea, Ukraine, USSR’, Vladlena is transferred to Grozny in the Chechen Republic after her parents' divorce and raised by her grandparents and lived in independent Chechnya during Russia's decade-long war on its own citizens. She is forced to use her right hand though she is left-handed, and frequently physically punished by teacher and grandfather. She has braided hair and looks a proper, upright girl (played in reenactments by Amina Taisumova). She falls in love with theater and especially King Kong. A man in a guerilla suit becomes a protector and imaginary friend.

Trauma shows up in how Vladlena draws nothing but monstrous creatures and plays with dolls only to cut them up into pieces. The little girl (herself) whose experience she recounts lives through the war in Chechnya and hears first-hand about murders and rapes, sees bodies lying on the streets, food is rationed and they have to walk five km. for water.

Here we see a sequence of stills, images that stay in the mind, of dead bodies lying akimbo on the street. She recounts an uncle being beaten to death while his wife lives but with head swollen and eyes filled with blood. Meanwhile there are lots of stagings in small theaters, scenes staged with dolls and puppets. The background music is a jaunty, eclectic mix, alternating with the sound of shells popping and explosions going off, or Strauss' "Blue Danube."

Sometimes she thinks of fields of poppies and running on the beach (red is a recurrent color).

It all works. The energy never fades and the rhythm is consistent in this, which the filmmaker says will be the first of four segments of a film history of her own life.

In his Screen Daily Venice review, Allan Hunter calls Memory a "lyrical hybrid documentary" which he says allows Vladlena "to revisit key experiences from her childhood and family history" whose "therapeutic value" comes through "recognising how trauma becomes a never-ending cycle as it passes from generation to generation." One is at once horrified, visually dazzled, engaged, and curiously detached.

Memory, 97 mins., debuted at Venice Aug . 17, 2025 as the opening presentation of its "Giornate degli Autori" strand, also showing at Athens, Vienna, and half a dozen other festials. It was screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films. Showtimes:
Thu, April 16 6:00 PM MoMA Titus 2 Q&A Vladlena Sandu
Fri, April 17 6:00 PMBWalter Reade Theater Q&A Vladlena Sandu

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.