Memory Box

Maia (Rim Turki), a single mother, lives in Montreal with her teenage daughter, Alex (Paloma Vauthier). On Christmas Eve, they receive an unexpected delivery: notebooks, tapes, and photos Maia sent to her best friend in the 1980’s Beirut. Maia refuses to open the box or confront its memories, but Alex secretly begins diving into it. Between fantasy and reality, Alex enters the world of her mother’s tumultuous, passionate adolescence during the Lebanese civil war, unlocking mysteries of a hidden past. Using Joana Hadjithomas’s own journals and tapes from 1982 to 1988 and Khalil Joreige’s wartime photographs form the archive, MEMORY BOX underlines the importance of the role of memory in a country where the history of the civil war remains absent from public and political discourses. (pf)