Film Screening: Panic!: Memoria

Memoria (2021), the most recent feature from Palme d’Or-winning filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, follows Scottish orchid farmer Jessica Holland (Tilda Swinton) over the course of a trip to visit her sister in Bogotá, Colombia. After Jessica is startled awake by a loud bang that only she is able to hear, she becomes afflicted with a mysterious sensory syndrome. Unable to sleep and increasingly fixated on locating the source of the strange sound, Jessica traverses Bogotá and the surrounding jungle. Along the way, she befriends an archaeologist named Agnes (Jeanne Balibar) and a fish scaler named Hernán (Elkin Díaz).

Delicate, hyponotic, and anchored by a restrained lead performance from Swinton, Memoria excavates the strange ways we become attuned to our physical and emotional worlds. Plumbing the lower frequencies of sensory experience and tapping the quieter forms of uncertainty and anxiety that flourish there, Memoria is an engrossing puzzle from one of today’s most singular cinematic voices.

In this event, sound editor Javier Umpierrez will join moderator Greg Siegel (Film and Media Studies, UCSB) for a post-screening discussion of Umpierrez’s work on Memoria.