IDFA x De Balie: Memory

In her first feature-length documentary filmmaker Vladlena Sandu, who lived through the war in Chechnya as a child, studies her traumatic memories in order to transcend and transform them via cinema.

After her parents’ separation, six-year-old Vladlena Sandu moved from Crimea to Grozny. There, in 1994, she was caught up in the Russian Federation’s war of occupation against the Chechen people. Years later, as a filmmaker, she revisits her childhood in this deeply personal, hybrid work of unbridled creativity. She searches for an answer to a fundamental question: how can we break the cycle of violence that shapes so many children and is passed down from generation to generation?

Sandu has transformed her war memories into an imaginative film brimming with lyrical, political, and surrealistic images. She created a toy theater in which plastic dolls depict the horrors she witnessed as a child, recounted matter-of-factly in her autobiographical voice-over. The tableaux and saturated colors are reminiscent of her inspirations, Andrei Tarkovsky and Sergei Parajanov, interspersed with Europop hits such as It’s My Life. A recurring figure is King Kong, her imaginary friend and protector amid the chaos and death brought by war—which is today still scarring the lives of countless children worldwide.