MEMORIA

Apichatpong Weerasethakul
« Memoria presents the entanglement of memories, personal and collective. Jessica wakes up as an empty shell and absorbs memories of people and places. The name Jessica is an hommage to one of my favourite films, Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked With a Zombie. In that film, Jessica Holland is the comatose wife of a sugar plantation owner irresistibly drawn by the sound of the voodoo drums at night. Here Jessica is the spirit of nothingness. She’s an amplifier (or an antenna) The skull with a hole is to be filled or to be emptied out. We don’t know. This sign of humanity exists deep in the mountains, which in themselves are holding layers of memories. Jessica walks a lot, which to me is an elegant gesture, to trace and collect these layers. Then she sits down by the stream and listens. Time decelerated. Would this feel like tapping into other people’s memories, or making a film in a foreign country? Possess/ Possessed – an equilibrium state when the self is removed; when nothingness could mean freedom. Maybe this was the answer to everything, including Jessica/Tilda’s migration. »
Apichatpong Weerasethakul