In a country where silence is survival, to speak is an act of rebellion. Filmmaker Vladlena Sandu’s first feature, “Memory,” is a haunting blend of documentary and dream, personal recollection and collective trauma, its script largely formed through recorded hypnotherapy sessions she attended. Born in Crimea and raised in war-torn Chechnya, Sandu reconstructs her past through fragments: family secrets, forgotten footage, and the stories no one was allowed to tell. She tells Anna Bogutskaya about the making of the film, an act of remembering in a country that insists on forgetting.
As part of WePresent’s ongoing partnership with International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), we selected “Memory” as our pick of the 2025 festival. The film will be screened at WePresent Night at Eye Filmmuseum on November 19, alongside a conversation with director Vladlena Sandu. You can buy tickets here.
It’s not easy to talk about things in Russia. The Chechnya War, “it’s not a war, it’s a special operation”. The war on Ukraine, another “special military operation.” When war is not defined as such, those who perish in it, those who witness it, are not allowed to call themselves as such. Director Vladlena Sandu’s film, “Memory,” her first feature-length effort, exists in these in-between spaces: the official lines, and what’s really happening. “We never talked about history,” she tells me, “history was built only by the government in their perspective. I realized I was one of the witnesses. I should build history because I am one of the witnesses who should create it.”
“Memory,” like its namesake, evades definition. It is images. It’s Sandu’s own memories, and some of mine, and some of many other children who were born in one country, saw it disappear on television one day and became citizens of another the next. It is a creation of an artist. It is a record of war. It is an exorcism. “At first I tried to build history, to reconstruct it. But another part of me understood that I needed art as therapy, an escape from the violence,” Sandu says. She was born in Crimea, and grew up in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, where she lived during the Russo-Chechen War.
The idea for “Memory” came over a decade ago. Sandu discovered a lot of images from the war on Chechnya researching a short film, whilst living in Moscow. “In Russia, it was like a secret. I understood that people didn’t know what was really happening,” she says. “My grandmother never wanted to talk about the past. Every time I asked, she escaped the conversation. That’s how trauma works: silence becomes a form of survival. We learn to forget.” The script formed itself through hypnotherapy sessions she attended. Those sessions were recorded, then turned into text, which she then worked into a script. Some memories came from interviews with Sandu’s friends: “It was like collecting fragments, pieces of memory that had to be put together.”
Sandu's memories form the skeleton of “Memory.” She narrates the film herself, speaking over reconstructed and created images. She was determined to cast young Chechen girls to play younger versions of herself. She got around the Chechen authorities using a fake script: “I wrote a fake script for the Ministry of Culture about my grandfather, a hero of the Second World War, because otherwise it was impossible. They approved that, and I could do my casting. We did the casting in a hall full of huge portraits of Putin and Kadyrov. It was surreal. In Chechnya you can’t make films without their permission. People who worked with me didn’t even know the real story.” And, then, another war: “We were editing “Memory” in 2022 when Russia started the full-scale war against Ukraine. Suddenly everything was different,” she says. “It felt like the film was speaking about the present, even though we began it 10 years ago.” War is in every frame.
“Memory” has been described as a hybrid documentary: truth, reconstructed. Dreamy, fabricated images of a sullen young pioneer girl. A child’s recollections, traced with the utmost desire for the truth. Sounds that hold within them violent, unseemly memories. In one scene, Sandu recalls being beaten with a leather belt by her World War Two hero grandfather for writing with her left hand. “As a child, they forced me to stop drawing because I used my left hand. I was afraid to create. Now I use the camera instead—it’s my way to draw.” Sandu cast young actresses to play younger versions of herself, but adults only appear as found images: the only picture of her parents together, young and smiling, her mother already pregnant with her. Her grandfather, meanwhile, is a flag, a passport photo blown up and undulating in the background. He is unsmiling, unforgiving, an emblem of the Soviet regime.
But Sandu’s film thinks beyond her own direct experiences, as much as they form the emotional anchor of them. It is for, and about, all children’s experience of war and fascism. “It doesn’t matter if it’s in the Soviet Union, North Korea, modern Russia, Gaza, Ukraine or Africa,” she says, “it’s the same experience for children growing up in war. The usual life is destroyed. The body, the brain, the behaviour change. Violence becomes normal. Every time, dictatorship means the killing of individualism. The process starts at school. The main goal is to kill the child’s protest, to make them accept everything adults say. That’s how a regime works: silence, obedience, no questions.” “Memory” is anti-silence, anti-obedience. It questions everything, including the director’s own recollections. It is, by her own definition, a form of art therapy: “If I take my bad memories out and look at them, they are no longer inside me. They become something I can observe. That’s how I heal.”
“Memory” unfolds like the slow realization that fantasies are just that, and adults are not always right, and that bad things can happen to anyone. “Everything for the camera. That’s what cinema is,” Sandu says. “What is documentary? What is fiction? It’s all performance, all construction.”
