Often nicknamed “Woody Allen of Mexican cinema”, the forty-four-year-old director Michel Franco, one of the most prolific contemporary filmmakers, presented his film Memory at the 58th KVIFF. With it, he brought the Brooklyn backdrop, where the ordinary life of a single mother is shaken by her encounter with a man showing symptoms of dementia.
“The idea for the film comes from a scene where a man follows a woman going home from a class reunion, and we don’t know why. I wondered who these people were,” the director told the audience. While the sensitively constructed plot suggests a romance, the director shakes off any labels. “When I was writing the script, people around pushed me to put the film under a certain label. But that’s nonsense. It just happened as it was supposed to happen,” the filmmaker noted, likening his organic directing style to Miloš Forman or the aforementioned Woody Allen.
Despite the low budget, the director managed to cast Jessica Chastain and Peter Sarsgaard as the leads, the latter winning an award for his role at last year’s Venice International Film Festival. The audience also noticed the thanks to the actor Benicio del Toro, who stars in this year’s official festival trailer, in the final credits. The director revealed that the thanks were for the free-of-charge consent to use a footage from Basquiat featured in the film Memory. The discussion with the audience touched on the director’s creative pace. “I try to make one film a year as I believe films should reflect real events happening in the director’s life. “The best approach is to take the best from the system and do it your own way,” concluded the director, who mentors promising young filmmakers at KVIFF in the framework of Future Frames – Generation NEXT of European Cinema.
