This Guardian review covers Memory, the feature documentary debut of Vladlena Sandu, which recreates her childhood in Grozny, Chechnya during the brutal Chechen-Russian wars of the 1990s. Rather than a conventional documentary, Sandu transforms her traumatic memories into a hybrid of staged tableaux, surreal imagery and childlike collage, effectively using the film as a form of cinematic exorcism. The reviewer frames the work as significant for how it renders inherited and collective trauma, tracing a loss of innocence that stretches across generations.

Sandu, born in Feodosia, Crimea, moved to Grozny aged six and experienced terror and bloodshed as the conflict escalated. The film depicts adult harm through striking symbolic imagery, such as a Lenin-faced cake representing school indoctrination and bloodied hands cradling a chick evoking her violent grandfather, all set to her present-tense diaristic voiceover. Stylistically, the film shifts from the vibrant, Parajanov-like tone of her early childhood to the more contemplative, Tarkovsky-esque mood of her teenage years, while also revealing that her grandfather's own father had been sent to the Stalinist gulags, linking her story to a wider legacy of political oppression and war's hidden casualties.