Interview with Joana Hadjithomas About Memory Box For Tribe Magazine
I was supposed to attend the 72nd edition of Berlinale earlier this month, but in the end cancelled my plans because of the rise in COVID cases in Germany and the restricted measures. After “attending” the festival online at home last year, I was looking forward to going back to Berlin, but alas…
So instead of a Berlinale 2022 round up, I will share with you a piece I wrote about a film from last year’s edition, Memory Box by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige which had its world premiere in Berlin last year. I had a chance to write about it for Tribe magazine, where I’ve recently become the Moving Image Editor.
Here’s my piece for its latest issue published this month.
Memory Box: An Interview with Joana Hadjithomas
The film Memory Box, by artists and filmmakers Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, is about the images and collective history that are not found in official history books. It is also steeped with their older artworks like Postcards of War, Lasting Images, and Two Suns in a Sunset, which viewers familiar with their work will instantly recognize.
Maia (Rim Turki) lives in Montreal with her teenage daughter, Alex (Paloma Vauthier). On Christmas Eve, they receive an unexpected package of notebooks, tapes, and photos that Maia had sent to her friend in France in the 1980s. Reluctant to confront past memories, Maia refuses to open the box, but Alex secretly dives into it and begins to learn about her mother’s adolescence during the Lebanese civil war.
The film is based on actual correspondences that Joana Hadjithomas had sent to her friend in France during her teenage years in Beirut and the civil war, between 1982 and 1988. She got hold of them twenty-five years, giving her access to an archive of journals, photos, audio tapes, and her past self, whom she did not recognize.
In an age where Facebook’s algorithm decides which of your old posts appears on your daily feed as a “memory," or where your iPhone alerts you to a “new memory” with a pre-assembled album of images, accompanied by stirring stock music, a film like Memory Box hits home the value of physical photos and journals, the importance of family history—especially for migrants and the diaspora—, and the question of what is passed on, said, and unsaid across generations.
I interviewed Joana Hadjithomas over Zoom. We talked about images, revisiting the past, and the making of the film.