Mem­o­ry Box

In this thought­ful and tex­tured exam­i­na­tion of one family’s approach to archiv­ing mem­o­ries, direct­ing part­ners Joana Had­jithomas and Khalil Jor­eige draw upon their vast mul­ti­me­dia exper­tise to craft a mov­ing tale about inter­gen­er­a­tional doc­u­men­ta­tion and its poignant implications.

Set in present day Mon­tréal, Maia (Rim Tur­ki) is sin­gle moth­er to teenage daugh­ter Alex (Palo­ma Vau­thi­er). When a box con­tain­ing Maia’s old diaries, albums and cas­settes is mailed to her by an old friend – to whom she had entrust­ed these trea­sures when she fled Lebanon in the late ​’80s – Alex decides to pore over her mother’s keep­sakes in private.

From this view­point, the film takes dar­ing leaps into sev­er­al medi­ums to trans­port us into Maia’s ado­les­cence (where she’s played by Man­al Issa) in Beirut, at once alive with the music of The Stran­glers and fraught with fear as the country’s civ­il war raged on.

A patch­work of deft­ly stitched vignettes, the film is suc­cess­ful in analysing how two dis­parate gen­er­a­tions can con­nect over their par­al­lel obses­sion with audio­vi­su­al doc­u­men­ta­tion. Videos, pho­tographs, holo­grams, inter­net search­es, phone noti­fi­ca­tions, self­ies, dreams: the film is a labyrinth of medi­ums that reflect the slip­per­i­ness and fal­li­bil­i­ty of memory.

It’s also, fit­ting­ly, an oblique ode to archi­va­tion and the preser­va­tion of phys­i­cal media – it offers a wel­come argu­ment against facile cries of ​‘live in the moment!’ as well as a duti­ful appre­ci­a­tion of the emo­tion­al weight that can be attached to com­pul­sive record-making.

Had­jithomas and Jor­eige are artists as much as they are film­mak­ers, and their dis­ci­plines span between doc­u­men­taries and pho­to­graph­ic instal­la­tions to sculp­tures and lec­tures. Need­less to say, their artis­tic dex­ter­i­ty is on full dis­play in Mem­o­ry Box. Gun­fire in Lebanon becomes light dam­age on a piece of film: a fogged pho­to­graph – devel­oped 30 years after it was tak­en – acts as a stand-in for a fad­ed mem­o­ry, the intrin­sic and the intan­gi­ble ren­dered in pixels.

While Alex bonds with her grand­moth­er over their Lebanese cul­ture by eat­ing kibbeh and rolling vine leaves, the film pays due dili­gence to the par­tic­u­lar dis­ori­ent­ing pow­er in dis­em­bod­ied voice record­ings in trig­ger­ing emo­tions across generations.

While it’s joy­ous to expe­ri­ence the tex­ture of such mem­o­ries echoed in the fab­ric of the film­mak­ing, per­haps Mem­o­ry Box strug­gles to coa­lesce its for­mal rigour with flesh­ing its char­ac­ters into some­thing beyond the invo­ca­tion of dig­i­tal ghosts. As a piece of fic­tion, there’s lit­tle to tru­ly be swept up in in terms of plot or char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion – the fram­ing device in par­tic­u­lar leaves lit­tle room for Alex to grow in the audience’s mind as some­one who does any­thing oth­er than turn the pages for us, as it were.

Falling short, too, is any sub­stan­tial inter­ro­ga­tion of the effects of the Lebanese Civ­il War: for Maia, per­son­al­ly, or her gen­er­a­tion as a col­lec­tive. But despite a pri­ori­ti­sa­tion of visu­al effects over sto­ry, Mem­o­ry Box makes a com­pelling case for chron­i­cling the big and small parts of your life, if only to share with gen­er­a­tions to come.