| “Memory is life.”
- Saul Bellow, The Bellarosa Connection
Take a moment… Imagine the exterior of your house or
apartment building.
Now bring to mind the face of your closest friend.
Think of your home telephone number. The license plate and
make of your car.
Then imagine that all of that information is erased. You are
left standing on an unfamiliar street… yours.
I am awake. Sunlight comes through the window,
a warm body sits next to me on the bed. Looking hard
against the sun I can see the face. ‘ So you’re
captivating,’ I say. ‘And who are you?’
‘ I’m your husband,’ he says, ‘I’m
Stuart.’ That’s a beginning. ‘And
who am I?’ I’d like to ask, ‘And
where are we?’ But that’s too much to
know just now.
--Jill Robinson, amnesiac and author
The documentary film Forget Me Nots is a
visual rumination on one of the most primary functions of
the human mind -- memory. The act of remembering – and
forgetting – is so intrinsic to our experience that
we usually don’t even notice it at work. But memory
not only allows us to navigate successfully through the day,
on a more profound level it is also the door to our sense
of identity and place in the world. If the door to memory
is closed, we are lost in the world, and lost to ourselves.
Forget Me Nots presents a creative weave of stories,
characters, images, and artifacts from popular culture that
vividly describe the central role of memory in our life, and
the often remarkable ways that it functions -- or fails to
function. The film’s narrative is structured around
two individuals whose stories illustrate extremes of memory
experience: Jill Robinson is a writer who lost her memory
while swimming, only to spend the next fifteen years trying
to regain it. Donald Davis is a nationally known storyteller
from North Carolina who comes out of a long oral tradition,
and whose craft and career are built on the art of remembering.
At two ends of the spectrum, their stories lay out a map for
charting the complex, mystifying landscapes of memory.
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