Memory is a recollection of an event. The capacity for remembering is partly what makes us human, as our current being is formulated through our interpretation of the past experience. Remembering requires conscious work. Social or collective memory as an interdisciplinary phenomenon has been in the focus of different disciplines for decades, only to become one of the central concepts around 2000s. Post-memory is a certain subcategory of memory used to describe inherited and indirect reminiscences which bear the cultural trauma and experiences of the previous generation(s). 

These movies make it evident that the past is not a given, but there is always the potential for multiple interpretations. Past is important because our perspective on the present and our outlook for the future is always influenced by what we have experienced before. Marianne Hirsch among others uses the term ‘post-memory’ to refer to memories of primarily traumatic events that the person has not experienced him- or herself, but nevertheless ‘remembers’ very vividly through the stories of the generation before. But this is deeply problematic. As Hirsch warns, ‘to grow up with overwhelming inherited memories, to be dominated by narratives that preceded one´s birth or one´s consciousness, is to risk having one´s own life stories displaced, even evacuated, by our ancestors.’ (1)

All of the films assembled under this theme deal with cultural disruptions on the micro-level, representing mostly personal stories within historical narratives. They demonstrate how individuals attempt to situate their own lives within the wider historic and cultural context. Some of them do so voluntarily, others feel the external obligation. From what is best left forgotten (Stony Paths) to what and how we want to remember (Battles), these documentaries go into the different memory practices, reconstruction and functioning of the collective memory and meaning-making processes.

roots seems to be crucial to the process of identity construction, as Stony Paths (2015) and Time Suspended (2015) explicitly demonstrate. Stony Paths, a crowd-funded documentary by a French movie-maker Arnaud Khayadjanian, follows in the footsteps of the author’s ancestors who escaped the Armenian genocide in Turkey in 1915. Khayadjanian is trying to investigate the suppressed history that the Turkish government is still finding hard to admit. Even the villagers do not always talk, but this is a meaningful silence, not a sign of ignorance or unawareness.

While the first three films concentrate on the past in the present of a certain place, the Belgian documentary Battles (2015, director Isabelle Tollenaere) takes us on a journey through four countries and four different representations of war. The viewer is presented with various objects that seem somewhat out of place: they are items related to war that are now used in a different and disconcerting manner.