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MOVIE CATEGORY
Director Vladlena Sandu was born in Crimea in 1982, but at a very young age she moved to Grozny, Chechnya, her family unable to anticipate the disaster that would soon unfold. As an adult, her memory is filled with conflicting recollections of a world that, during her childhood, had effectively turned upside down: from the myth of Lenin (from which even the second part of her name derives) to the collapse of the USSR, a historical upheaval that inevitably shakes any idea Sandu might have of memory and nostalgia. Through archival materials and poetic tableaux vivants reminiscent of the cinema of Sergei Paradžanov, Memory is a woman’s struggle not to be a slave to history but instead to become the protagonist of her own past.
DIRECTORY
A film and theater director who addresses themes like post-war trauma, dictatorship and colonialism. A graduate of VGIK in Moscow with a degree in Film Directing, she then studied Aesthetic and Cultural Theory. Her films have toured Europe’s most important festivals, including Berlin, Rotterdam, and Dok Leipzig. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, she moved to Amsterdam, where her performance, The Rainbow Cinema, based on her personal experiences with sex trafficking, was a huge success. Her first feature film, Memory, premiered at the Venice Days in 2025 and received the People’s Choice Award.
