Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige: Memory Box

An inventive multi-media, multi-generational drama, Memory Box toggles between 1983 war-torn Beirut and present-day Montreal. A teenage girl intercepts a mysterious package, addressed to her mother. Defying her grandmother’s protective instincts and determined to break through her mother’s secrecy and stoicism, she surreptitiously immerses herself in the box’s contents. Her mother’s scrapbooks, letters, and audio recordings from her own heady youth, vibrant with romantic euphoria, political happenings, and familial despair, fill the young girl’s imagination and spark her need to know more about her historical-emotional lineage. The story processes media of the past via modes of the present: emoji-filled texts, emails, and smartphone snapshots.

Memory Box premiered at the 2021 Berlin International Film Festival. It is the first Lebanese film to be nominated for the Berlinale Competition section in 40 years. Hadjithomas and Joreige’s feature films The Lebanese Rocket Society, A Perfect Day and Je veux voir (featuring Catherine Deneuve and Rabih Mroué) have been screened and awarded in major international festivals, with their artworks exhibited in prominent museums, biennales and art centers worldwide. They were awarded the prestigious Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2017.

All 7:40pm shows from August 5–11 will be followed by a Q&A with Hadjithomas & Joreige, recorded especially for the Film Forum run. The Q&A is co-presented by ArteEast and moderated by Film Programs Curator Ginou Choueiri.

Watch the trailer here.

“An intoxicating cocktail of recollections...and an ingenious blend of image and music...that allow our own experience to empathetically blend with those of the characters in a mix of imagination and reality.” —Jay Weissberg, Variety

“Deals in the ephemeral and contains the same compassion, curiosity and joyful invention found in Agnès Varda’s body of work. [The filmmakers] inventively embrace digital, print and analogue media to reflect the underpinning of history and the power and beauty of archived material seen by new eyes.” —Katherine McLaughlin, Sight + Sound

“The first film in nine years from the award-winning team of Joana Hadijthomas and Khalil Joreige, whose work  has ranged freely over feature films, docs, installations and performance art. Memory Box shows the sophisticated modernity of their artistic approach...including collages of hundreds of old photos, grainy super 8 footage, notebooks,songs and music, sound bites and newspaper articles.” —Deborah Young, The Hollywood Reporter