Memoria

Palme d’Or–winning visionary Apichatpong Weerasethakul returns with this hotly anticipated English-language collaboration with Tilda Swinton, which won the 2021 Cannes Jury Prize.

After a long six-year wait, the acclaimed Weerasethakul (Cemetery of Splendour, MIFF 2015; Syndromes and a Century, MIFF 2006) returns with Memoria, his first film shot outside his native Thailand and in the English language. Inspired by his extensive travels in Colombia, the film stars Tilda Swinton (The Human Voice, MIFF 2021; The Souvenir, MIFF 2019) as a Scottish orchid farmer visiting her ailing sister in Bogotá. While there, she forms a bond with a French archaeologist played by Jeanne Balibar (Les Misérables, MIFF 2019), who is working on a construction project, and – in dreamlike Weerasethakul style – faces a series of strange sights and sounds that disrupt her sleep.

Taking home the 2021 Jury Prize at Cannes, where Weerasethakul won the Palme d’Or in 2010 for Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Memoria finds the unrivalled filmmaker shooting in the mountains of Pijao and in the Colombian capital, observing the phantoms of colonial history by playing, as he puts it, “the role of a drifting ghost, absorbing movements, lights and sounds”. Pitched between historical reckoning and hypnotic waking state, Memoria is a phenomenal comeback by one of contemporary cinema’s greatest auteurs.

“Lulls you into its rhythms, gives you the sparse outlines of an intellectual framework, then hits you with the full weight of accumulated lyricism that must be pure cinema.” – Little White Lies