Memoria – Trailer – SFF 21

The 68th Sydney Film Festival: 03-14 November 2021

Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Straight from the Cannes Competition, Thai auteur Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s mystical and mysterious new film stars Tilda Swinton as a woman visiting Colombia who is haunted by a loud sound.

Jessica is in Bogotá, Colombia, to visit her sister. At daybreak, she is startled by a loud bang which has a profound and lingering effect on her. Since hearing the bang, Jessica is unable to sleep and sets out to understand its meaning. She tries, with the help of sound engineer Hernan (Juan Pablo Urrego) to replicate the sound, and also befriends Agnes (Jeanne Balibar), an archaeologist studying human remains. As the frequency of the bangs increases, Jessica appears to be living in an alternate reality – at odds with those around her. A meeting in the jungle with a fish scaler, also named Hernan (Elkin Diaz), could just bring her closer to understanding her experience. As concerned here with the minuscule as with the magnificent, Weerasethakul takes us on a sweeping journey involving architecture, archaeology, sleep, dreaming and memory. The result is utterly mesmerising and a vital addition to the body of work of one of the most original, imaginative filmmakers today.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul was born in Bangkok, Thailand, and won the Cannes Palme d’Or for Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (SFF 2010). He made his debut with Mysterious Object at Noon (2000) and has won several international awards for his films such as Blissfully Yours (2002), Tropical Malady (2004) and Syndromes and a Century (SFF 2007). He is also recognised as a major international visual artist.

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