On today’s episode of our daily NYFF59 podcasts, NYFF Director of Programming Dennis Lim sits down with director Apichatpong Weerasethakul and actress Tilda Swinton to discuss Memoria, a selection in the Main Slate section of this year’s festival.
Memoria screens again on Sunday, October 10th at 4:30pm. Standby tickets may be available.
Collective and personal ghosts hover over every frame of Memoria, somehow the grandest yet most becalmed of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s works. Inspired by the Thai director’s own memories and those of people he encountered while traveling across Colombia, the film follows Jessica (a wholly immersed Tilda Swinton), an expat botanist visiting her hospitalized sister in Bogotá; while there, she becomes ever more disturbed by an abyssal sound that haunts her sleepless nights and bleary-eyed days, compelling her to seek help in identifying its origins. Thus begins a personal journey that’s also historical excavation, in a film of profound serenity that, like Jessica’s sound, lodges itself in the viewer’s brain as it traverses city and country, climaxing in an extraordinary extended encounter with a rural farmer that exists on a precipice between life and death. Winner of the Jury Prize at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival. A NEON release.
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Watch/listen to the discussion on the film below and don’t forget to subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, or Stitcher for more filmmaker conversations.
