‘Memory’ Review: Crimean-Born Director Vladlena Sandu Mourns Innocence Lost In A Harrowing War-Time Memoir – Venice Film Festival

‘Memory’ Review: A Haunting Memorial Collage Crafted from a Child’s Experience of War

The writer, director, editor and narrator of “Memory,” Vladlena Sandu, grew up in ’90s Chechnya. War was on her doorstep, and often not only there, but inside her childhood home, with its boots under the table and its breath on her neck. As a poetic, deeply cinematic recollection of that turbulent era, told in densely allusive imagery, in grave Tarkovsky compositions and saturated Parajanov colors, “Memory” is already powerful. But as an evocati…

‘Memory’ Review: Crimean-Born Director Vladlena Sandu Mourns Innocence Lost In A Harrowing War-Time Memoir – Venice Film Festival

If, as they say, the first casualty of war is innocence, then the harrowing memoir Memory from director Vladlena Sandu is the proof. Born in Crimea in the early ’80s and sent to live with her grandparents in Grozny (then Chechnya), Sandu has had some pretty bad luck in her time, to put it mildly. […]