“This stuff brings me close to what you call dreams,” he tells her. Their conversation continues in Hernán’s home, where he offers Jessica a glass of liquor he makes himself that appears to be aguardiente.
He also tells her that his kind never dreams, demonstrating by falling into a motionless sleep on the creek bank with his eyes open. He picks up a rock and shares the past it contains.
He explains that he has never traveled nor watched movies, TV or seen news in any format because there are already enough stories and he remembers everything. In Weerasethakul’s conceptual world, he appears to be the same person seen earlier. She travels out of town past roadside military checkpoints to visit Agnes at the excavation site, still looking for answers in her broken Spanish.īut those only come when she follows a creek in a nearby mountain village and meets an older man also named Hernán (Elkin Díaz). The skull of a young girl has a hole that Agnes explains was probably drilled into it to release bad spirits, in a sense what Jessica is attempting to do by seeking out the noise that triggered her insomnia. She has an illuminating encounter with Agnes (Jeanne Balibar), an archeologist studying ancient human remains disinterred during construction on a tunnel. She visits art galleries, which are nothing if not vaults of memory, and walks the city streets, stopping in a public square where she hears the noise again. Again, she wonders if one of those spells is making her sick.Įven while sitting at dinner, Jessica hears the same startling sound over and over, though neither of her companions appears to notice it. Karen belongs to an experimental theater company developing a piece about an Amazon jungle tribe called “The Invisible People,” whose elders are believed to keep outsiders away with incantations. Later, when Karen is released from hospital, Jessica goes to dinner with her sister and the latter’s partner, academic and poet Juan (Daniel Giménez Cacho). The nature of Karen’s illness remains unclear, but in a dream she recalls seeing a dog injured by a car and left to die, which she took to a vet and then forgot due to preoccupations about her own health.
A mutual friend connects her with a young sound engineer, Hernán (Juan Pablo Urrego), who draws from a file of movie audio effects to help her describe what she heard - “like a ball of concrete hitting a metal wall surrounded by seawater it’s like a rumble from the core of the earth.” In the film’s opening moments, Jessica is jolted out of slumber in the pre-dawn hours by a loud bang, a single thud she mistakenly assumes must be from construction work on a neighboring property. who specializes in orchids, in Bogotá visiting her hospitalized sister, Karen (Agnes Brekke). But as it washes over you, Memoria excavates the country’s bloody history of violence, the fears of its people, and the topographic trauma of earthquakes and mudslides that make the land itself a vessel for memory.Ĭonventional notions of plot in a Weerasethakul movie are seldom the point, but here goes anyway: Swinton plays Jessica, a botanist from the U.K. The writer-director’s wander through the cities, sierras and jungles of Colombia doesn’t match the cultural specificity that gives his Thai films such hypnotic power, and it perhaps remains even more impervious to rigid interpretation. Offer must be redeemed the same day of screening.Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)Ĭast: Tilda Swinton, Elkin Díaz, Jeanne Balibar, Juan Pablo Urrego, Daniel Giménez Cacho, Agnes Brekke, Jerónimo Barón, Constanza Guitérrezĭirector-screenwriter: Apichatpong Weerasethakul A NEON release.Ĭlosed captions available with our capti-view devices.Įnjoy 10% off beer and wine at Indie Food and Wine when presenting your ticket (digital or printed) for FLC programming. Winner of the Jury Prize at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival. Thus begins a personal journey that’s also historical excavation, in a film of profound serenity that, like Jessica’s sound, lodges itself in the viewer’s brain as it traverses city and country, climaxing in an extraordinary extended encounter with a rural farmer that exists on a precipice between life and death. Inspired by the Thai director’s own memories and those of people he encountered while traveling across Colombia, the film follows Jessica (a wholly immersed Tilda Swinton), an expat botanist visiting her hospitalized sister in Bogotá while there, she becomes ever more disturbed by an abyssal sound that haunts her sleepless nights and bleary-eyed days, compelling her to seek help in identifying its origins.
Free Outdoor Screening: The Wiz (September 2)Ĭollective and personal ghosts hover over every frame of Memoria, somehow the grandest yet most becalmed of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s works.