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Though it feels like the phrase “generational trauma” is everywhere these days, it’s only in the past decade that growing mental health awareness has made such terms ubiquitous. Though scientists have long studied the ways inherited trauma can actually alter our DNA, only recently have epigenetics filtered into everyday usage. But artists do not need science to tell them what they feel in their bones, and film is a powerful tool to illustrate the ephemeral memories one stores in the body.

Set between present-day Montreal and 1980s Beirut, “Memory Box” actualizes a treasure trove of unprocessed trauma in the form of a mysterious box of letters, scrapbooks, and tapes. When a curious daughter discovers a vast archive of her mother’s distant past, she begins to understand the difficult woman who raised her in new ways. As cassette recordings fade into voice memos, the work of filmmakers Joana Hadjithomas...

Some movies spoof a sub-genre on their own. There is the term “Big Chill clone” that brings together the films about a group of school friends that went their separate ways gathering again to mourn the untimely death of one of their buddies and to take a walk down the memory lane. The Berlinale competition title “Memory Box” might eventually end up in that familiar territory, but the road to it is quite particular and with a number of side topics woven into the film’s fabric.

There are multiple reasons for it, one of them being the focus on the three generations of women of a Quebecois family of Lebanese immigrants, the second being the background of the Lebanese Civil War and the traumas it left, while the third one is the fact that this co-operation by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige is based on the material from Hadjithomas’ personal collection of memories.

One of two films at the 2021 Berlinale about the lasting trauma of the Lebanese Civil War (along with the superior Miguel’s War), Memory Box follows three generations of Lebanese women, now living in Montreal, whose lives are uprooted when a literal box of memories lands on their doorstep. “It’s bad memories,” Téta (Clémence Sabbagh) tells her curious granddaughter, Alex (Paloma Vauthier), when she sees the box is from a woman named Liza Haber. It’s Christmas Eve, and these “bad memories” aren’t the kind of present Téta wants to give her daughter, Maia (Rim Turki). So she stuffs them away in a cupboard, to be dealt with at a later date.

Memory Box is “freely adapted” (as a title card states) from the real-life correspondences of its co-writer-director Joana Hadjithomas, who made the film with her husband, Khalil Joreige. As a young woman living in Beirut, Hadjithomas...

When directors Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige uncovered a trove of photographs, journals and audio recordings they had made while growing up in Beirut of the 1980s, they knew these personal archives would fuel their next film. Acclaimed artists and documentarians, the creative duo opted to develop these archives into a narrative feature that tells the story of two generations of mothers and daughters.

Set in present-day Canada and 1980s Lebanon, Berlin competition title “Memory Box” focuses on an adolescent girl who stumbles upon her mother’s own personal archives — and through them discovers her mother at a wholly different age.

Why did you want to develop this as fiction feature — your first in over a decade?

Hadjithomas: We had so much material that we didn’t want to go into a documentary. For us, it was clear to take those existing documents, those pictures and tapes, and work them into narrative fiction.

Perhaps it’s because “Memory Box” is freely adapted from co-director Joana Hadjithomas’ teenage letters and diaries that this is the most affectingly Proustian of the filmmaker’s works made with Khalil Joreige. “Perhaps” because it would be wrong to treat this richly multi-layered exploration of memory and how it’s processed across generations as a standard fictionalized memoir. Well-known for how they organically incorporate experimental techniques into films tackling the traumas of Lebanese society since the Civil War, the duo here weave together what starts as an almost too-traditional mother-daughter struggle today with visualizations of life in Beirut during the early 1980s. The combination becomes an intoxicating cocktail of recollections while also addressing how different generations process the touchstone triggers of memory.

Through an ingenious blend of image and music, Hadjithomas and Joreige’s creative treatment of the image, including meaningful juxtaposition of different gauges and textures, has never...