Memory Box 

by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige

Liban, Canada

Director : Joana Hadjithomas,  Khalil Joreige 

Script : Gaëlle Macé, Joana Hadjithomas, Khalil Joreige

Photographer : Josée Deshaies 

Editing : Tina Baz

Sound : Guillaume le Bras, Rana Eid 

Music : Radwan Ghazi, Moumnehn Charbel Haber 

Actors : Rim Turki, Manal Issa, Paloma Vauthier, Clémence Sabbagh, Hassan Akil 



Production : Haut et Court, Abbout Productions, Micro_scope 

 

Distributor :  

Year : 2021

Screening : 2023

DCP, Color, 102 mn, OV arabic SUBFR and FRV

Official Selection Berlinale 2021

Montreal, on Christmas Day, Maia and her daughter, Alex, get a strange parcel from Beirut. It contains notebooks, cassettes and photographs, all the correspondence that Maia, between the ages of 13 and 18, sent from Beirut to her best friend who had moved away to Paris to flee the civil war. Maia refuses to face up to her past but Alex dips into it in secret. She finds out between fantasy and reality, about the tumultuous, passionate adolescence of her mother in the 80s and well-kept secrets. For six years, Joana Hadjithomas and her girlfriend confided in each other about their daily lives. “In a certain way, looking again at pictures from our adolescence brings us closer to the reality of the film, it helps us to get as near as possible to the 80s. We draw from this primal source which we are lucky to have. Stuck in Canada during a snowstorm, these photos give young Alex food for her imagination and the inventions she forges from the stories contained in her mother’s notebooks, to retrieve and reproduce these instants in time, in a country and an era which she never knew.” Khalil Joreige