Negotiating Amnesia

Negotiating Amnesia is an essay film based on research conducted at the Alinari Archive and the National Library in Florence. It focuses on the Ethiopian War of 1935-36 and the legacy of the fascist, imperial drive in Italy. Through interviews, archival images and the analysis of high-school textbooks employed in Italy since 1946, the film shifts through different historical and personal anecdotes, modes and technologies of representation.

Nighthouse

Shot in Havana and processed at Phil Hoffman's Film Farm, Marcel Beltrán Fernández's Casa de la noche explores those same histories from the point of view of an insider, as a lived experience that is evocatively mirrored through ripped and torn celluloid.

Horizon: How Does Your Memory Work?

You might think that your memory is there to help you remember facts, such as birthdays or shopping lists. If so, you would be very wrong. The ability to travel back in time in your mind is, perhaps, your most remarkable ability, and develops over your lifespan. Horizon takes viewers on an extraordinary journey into the human memory. From the woman who is having her most traumatic memories wiped by a pill, to the man with no memory, this film reveals how these remarkable human stories are transforming our understanding of this unique human ability. The findings reveal the startling truth that everyone is little more than their own memory.

Fragments de route

How to Remember

The story of a young Kurdish man who tries to remember his past traumatic experiences. A young migrant struggles to remember the memories of post-2015 Turkey while faced with the commemoration practices of the Holocaust. The film takes place in present-day Krakow, Poland, particularly in the former Nazi concentration camp in Plaszow.

Their Houses

Filmmaker Cam Archer examines and explores his ordinary, suburban neighborhood in search of hidden truths, new narratives and a better understanding of his fading, creative self. Combining heavily degraded video with personal photographs and real life neighbors, Archer re-imagines the concept of 'home video'. In an attempt to distance himself from his subjects, actress Jena Malone narrates the piece as Archer in the first person.

7 Vidas

A community of cats lives in the Soledade Cemetery Park in Belém. "7 Vidas" follows these animals through a fictional letter written by one of them to his former owner. With real images of the cats among graves and trees, the film builds a sensitive narrative about abandonment, freedom and memory, revealing the poetry hidden in the coexistence between life and death.

Hometown: A Portrait of the American Opioid Epidemic

An intimate look at the human faces of America's current opioid epidemic. Seen through the eyes of a mother and the lens of a small town.

Heredity

Flora, 30, is a French geneticist. She analyzes what is transmitted or not between generations. She lost her parents who were fervent Maoists within the proletarian Left from the end of the 1960s. She must now sort through her parents' apartment: what to choose to keep or not from their memory?

Beyond Me

A film that explores the power of childhood adventures through the lens of Super 8 film reels to inspire life in the moment, cherishing the times that shape our lives. Through the recollection of childhood adventures and family journeys, this documentary captures timeless beauty of memory, reminding us to live in the moment.

Ali's Story

For DJs, life revolves around records. Around sounds. Every life is a story, every DJ is a narrator. Every stack of records is an endless collection of stories, myths, and memories. Can we know someone’s life through their records? For some, we can even know their impact.

(Sol)ar Memories

To process grief, a young adult revisits fragments of their late grandmother’s life to restore the version of their own inner child when she still remembered them.

Remembering Port Chicago

In California's Bay Area, a painful memory lingers of the Port Chicago disaster of WWII, when hundreds of the Navy's first Black Sailors perished, and the White officers in charge were protected by the chain of command.

Mary Remembering

A short animated documentary featuring archival recordings of the filmmaker's Volga-German Great-Great-Grandmother, Mary Frank Lind, in which she recalls key memories of childhood—her father's windmill, warm rains, wolf sightings, bone trading, and her passion for carpentry, which broke gender norms but was supported by her father.

Adrift by the Towers

Vila das Torres was a self-built community based on one of the largest urban gardens in Rio de Janeiro, below the energy towers of the Light Company and next to the train lines. Eight years after its removal for the construction of Parque Madureira, former residents report their memories.

Buck Southworth: U.S. Air Force Flight Crew

In this short documentary, the life story of Buck Southworth as a U.S. Air Force aircrewman is told and narrated by his wife, Priscilla Southworth, now a Cemetery Volunteer at Cape Canaveral National Cemetery. This is a remarkable and touching documentary about bravery, mission and love.

RE:MEMBER

RE:MEMBER is a documentary, split into three chapters, that provides insights into the topics of memory, media, and history, specifically through the lens of two millennial participants. Through their testimonies and introspections, we start to see the rift between the media they were nostalgic for and the reality we currently live in. They also consider how our current attitudes towards media have shaped our previous environments and how we can change society to better our future generations.

Isla de Fuegos

The Island is a real territory, as well as a metaphorical one, a synthesis of the country and of civilization, of progress and injustice. An intensive expression of the human effort to overcome adversity.

Tricky Memory

The lastest neuroscience discoveries show surprising results: false memories, distortion, modification, déjà vus. Our memory is affected in many ways, and deceives us every day. The very fact of recalling souvenirs modifies them. The everyday consequences are manyfold. To what extent can we rely on our souvenirs? How much credit can we give them during trials? Even more shocking, scientists have proved to be able to manipulate our memory: creating artificial souvenirs, deleting, emphasizing or restoring them on demand.

Ghosts: Long Way Home

After a spell cast by Grandma Faraway, the oldest son of a small family encounters the ghost of his late Grandma Maria still living in her old house, and they chat as they used to.