Drama deftly switches across generations and time to explore the traumas inflicted by the civil war
) tackles the painful legacy of the civil war and ongoing troubles of their homeland Lebanon. But while Memory Box playfully incorporates different media and filmic textures into its story, as did the co-directors’ earlier work, ultimately it is an eminently accessible feature film about three generations living through intense trauma and coming out the other side, mostly intact.
The action properly starts in the present day in Montreal where teenager Alex lives with her mother Maia and grandmother Teta . One snowy Christmas Eve, a huge box of journals, notebooks, cassette tapes and photographs arrives from France, all memorabilia that Maia sent from Beirut to her friend Liza in Paris while the Lebanese civil war of the 1980s was raging.
Afraid of the painful memories and long submerged secrets that the material might reveal, Alex is forbidden by her grandmother and Maia from looking at the box’s contents. Of course, like one of Bluebeard’s wives in the fairytale, she goes ahead and dives in.
In all seriousness though, this is a film with a deep reservoir of empathy for all its characters. While the oldest generation find themselves racked between the conventional expectations of the past and the gravest traumas of the times, the youngest are just as confused and lost, their pain no less real even if the causes seem less dramatic.
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