A version of this interview with ‘Memory Box’ directors Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige first appeared in the international edition of awards magazine TheWrap.
In Memory Box, a Montreal teenager is transfixed when she discovers a box filled with notebooks, audiotapes, and photographs taken by her mother during the civil war in Lebanon in the 1980s. Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, who also work as visual and video artists, they used Hadjithomas’ real notebooks from that time to inspire the story; many of those notebooks appear in the film, along with photographs taken by Joreige. The film is Lebanon’s Oscar entry.
An opening credit says that his film was loosely adapted from true events. How did it work?
JOANA HADJITHOMAS The film is a fiction. It is not the story of my life or my parents or anything like that. But it’s based on notebooks I wrote to my best friend in the 80s. He had to leave Lebanon to live in Paris during the civil war and we promised to write to each other every day. And so we did for six years. We recorded tapes and sent images. And then we lost touch for over 25 years. But when we met again it was very strange because she had taken everything and I had taken everything. So we traded them and I had this weird personal file. Kahlil and I thought it would be interesting to do something with them, but we didn’t really know what we would do.
JALIL JOREIGE We have a daughter and she was very interested in reading her mother’s notebooks. But after reading them, she noticed that there was a certain distance between what she told Joana and what she was in her notebooks. And we thought, maybe it wasn’t a very good idea for our daughter, a growing teenager…
HADJITOMAS … I would read them. But she liked the idea of a teenager away from a country and a situation, reading and imagining her mother as her teenager.
How did you shape the story that would go with that premise and with the notebooks?
HADJITOMAS Very early on we had the idea of a daughter who is reading her mother’s hidden past, because it seems to be universal. But for the first time, we work with a screenwriter. We felt like we needed some distance, we needed someone who had never been to Beirut and knew nothing about the civil war.
GEORGE It was a very long process since we received this amazing file. We are also artists, and there was the possibility of turning this into an art project, but suddenly we realized how different daily writing was from what remained in Joana’s memory and from what she told us.
HADJITOMAS One of the motivations was because we are artists and filmmakers, and we feel that those worlds don’t communicate much. There was this challenge of making a movie that was very accessible but also had a lot of artistic experimentation.
It is both an accessible and adventurous film. Was it difficult to find that mix?
HADJITOMAS Yes it was. We really wanted to talk about streaming and how we can try to put the past behind us.
GEORGE The film was distributed in various countries around the world, and we noticed how this broadcast story was something that people can share across generations and places. People consider this to be their story, we hear it a lot. Of course, for the Lebanese it was on another level. As we were dealing with our past, we suddenly realized that, due to the context, we were also dealing with our present. In the editing room, we asked ourselves: “Is this present or past? Does the past echo our present? Ideas evolved during editing.
HADJITOMAS While we were shooting the film we had a very close relationship with archeology because we were also doing an art project related to archeology and geology. And in this film we had the impression of digging into the past, but also of all these cycles of catastrophe and regeneration that you see in geology. The story began to become a palimpsest in our minds: an accumulation of stories, details, moments and music that gives you the impression of reconnecting with something from your past.
Read more of the international edition here.
