memory

The director goes to the operating table in London. During heart surgery, his body becomes a court space. A courtroom opens in his chest, where successive versions of himself testify against each other.

In Memory, Youssef Chahine turns autobiography into a surreal structure in which memory, cinema and Egyptian history overlap. The film is set between modern-day Cairo and the memory of Alexandria, a multilingual, cosmopolitan city that gradually disappears after the 1952 revolution and subsequent political transformations.

Born in 1926 in Alexandria, raised in the multicultural world of the Mediterranean frontier, Chahine treats his own life as film material. In his cinema, Fellini meets Chaplin, and private experience becomes a tool for narrating a collective loss.

Memory is at the same time self-analysis and elegy for a world that has ceased to exist.

In the background of the film, the story of Egyptian surrealism returns: the Art et Liberté group, which in 1938 responded to fascism with the manifesto “Long live degenerate art!” The group's evocation of Art et Liberté inserts the film into the broader history of surrealism as an international network of political and artistic revolts.