Memory

When she was 6 years old, Vladlena Sandu was sent to live in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, with her tyrannical grandfather, who would whip her when she received bad marks for miswriting Lenin’s name on a school assignment. She was still living there a few years later when the Soviet Union collapsed, Lenin’s portraits came down in the classroom, and Chechnya’s war of independence brought different forms of violence to her door. Initially resulting in a degree of autonomy for the Chechens, their revolution was a humiliation for post-Soviet Russia, which retook the republic and leveled Grozny in a second conflict, fueling Vladimir Putin’s ascent to power. These historical currents are the unsteady backdrop of Sandu’s autobiographical first feature, which restages moments from her childhood as jewel-like 16mm vignettes with the saturated colors of Parajanov, the metaphoric imagery of Tarkovsky, and the handcrafted stage-magic resourcefulness of Fanny and Alexander. The traumas of war and family separation are transmuted into flashes of sense memory, as Sandu filters a searingly relevant recent history through a child’s imagination.