Ion Martea
posted 1 September 2006

Eva Lipschitz (Nathalie Press) is a young Polish girl awaiting her lover in the woods one sunny day in the 1940s. She fusses over her appearance, anxious to please him. But he is late. Suddenly she hears him calling her, telling her to run, as shots in the village announce the arrival of the Gestapo. Eva Lipschitz (Sara Kestelman) is at her life's dusk, suffering from dementia, stuck alone in a wheelchair at a retirement home in a London suburba, unheard, unwanted and misunderstood.

Josh Appignanesi, who recently directed the audacious Song of Songs, has made a short film, which may lack character development, yet which manages to engage its audience and leave us enthralled. The film is not really about a specific story, not focused on plot or character. Instead, Ex Memoria looks at its audience, and the audience's own history, the audience's own relationship with family elders, the audience's relationship with strangers.

Dementia is a topic film has always found hard to deal with. There is always the temptation to create such a strong emotional connection with the characters suffering from it that ultimately the audience loses sight of the particularities of the illness. On this occasion, we are made to stop and think about these, and are instinctively led into shaping a personal approach to real life situations when we happen to face a man or woman with dementia, not cold-heartedly, not with pity, but with understanding.

There is a history within every one of us, be it monstrous or entirely void of success. We have all been tempted to fall in love, we have all made a bad joke, or, if we were lucky, happened to make a good one, we have had friends, and we have lost friends. This history is all ours, it does not need to be shared, talked about, advertised at every meeting with any stranger - it's there, it lives with a pulse that never stops, even if the memory is slowly covered by an imperceptible dust-storm.

Eva is one such character, played outstandingly by an unrecognisable Sara Kestelman. She has a history, but does not want to live in it, not because of its horrors, but because she feels deep inside as somebody who is utterly alive, someone who wants to share human emotions with a fellow being. Unfortunately, her family sees her as a burden that needs visiting only once a month, and that can be limited to a few formal minutes. Her fellow patients are trapped by their own parallel desperation. The only ones who can make a difference are the social care staff, but even they rarely treat their patients as human beings with souls of their own.

There is hope however. Even if the director was forced (not necessarily literally, but in order to meet the condition of the commission to make an educational film) to include one social care officer with an admirable approach to dementia; the true hope comes with the closing image. It is moments like the last shots of Ex Memoria, (images that cannot be described, but must be experienced,) that elevate any film beyond didacticism. These are rare instances in any artform. Appignanesi is currently so close to achieve perfection with every shot that one cannot but wonder whether we are witnessing the birth a true force in British filmmaking.