“When he came to, the present was almost intolerable in its richness and sharpness, as were his most distant and trivial memories… Now his perception and his memory were infallible.”
—Jorge Luis Borges, “Funes the Memorious”
Amongst the research materials, set photographs, email correspondence, and treatment excerpts included in Fireflies Press’ new artist’s book on the making of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria is the story of Eduardo, proprietor of the derelict Cinema Roman in Bogota, Colombia. As the tale goes, Eduardo grew up in the ’50s doing odd jobs for the theatre’s original owner, who, after fleeing to Armenia to escape the era’s political turmoil, was still able to financially support his two sons’ medical studies through the revenue generated by the cinema. The two sons eventually opened Bogota’s first hospital. Meanwhile, Eduardo and his father continued to operate the theatre until the 1999 earthquake forced its closure. In 2016, the owner gave the cinema to Eduardo and his family, who hope to one day revive it and continue, as the book describes it, this “beautiful story about family bonds and cinema and doctors.” Memoria, which premiered in Competition at this year’s Cannes (where it shared the Jury Prize with Nadav Lapid’s Ahed’s Knee), wasn’t the first film I saw back in a cinema following pandemic closures, but it was the first great one. And while it may not “save” the medium—or whatever ridiculous standard armchair critics continue to hold movies to during these tentatively renascent times—it has, like the story of Eduardo and the Cinema Roman, restored a bit of my faith in its future.
arrives amidst a flurry of activity for the 51-year-old Thai filmmaker. In addition to the feature and the book, there’s , his contribution to the omnibus project (which also premiered at Cannes); a solo exhibition of his video and installation work at the IAC Villeurbanne; and a career-spanning retrospective at FIDMarseille, where the director was on hand just days after Cannes to receive the festival’s Grand Prix d’Honneur. Acknowledgements and achievements aside, Apichatpong betrays no signs of complacency as he enters his third decade in the field. is indeed a change of pace for the filmmaker: an international production spoken largely in Spanish and featuring a cast of professional actors led by Tilda Swinton, it’s less a summation than a step into the unknown. What remains is a set of
