The Memory Palace

The wide-ranging, international selection of films that reside together in The Memory Palace are united by a shared concern with matters that might be termed “Proustian”: either endeavoring to recreate an era that the filmmakers recall personally, or going still further back to explore ancestral memory, as in titled aristocrat Luchino Visconti’s adaptation of Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel of the Italian aristocracy’s humbling by an ascendant 19th-century bourgeois, The Leopard. Traveling from Cultural Revolution–era China (Jia Zhangke’s Platform) to postwar Liverpool (Terence Davies’s Distant Voices, Still Lives) to, well, the end of the ’60s in Brussels (Chantal Akerman’s Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the 60s in Brussels), among many, many other ports of call. A program of films that reach into the past without indulging in moony nostalgia, sifting through memories of the world of yesterday to unearth recollections both bitter and sweet.