This You Must Remember | Это вы должны помнить

Synopsis

‘These images are not about people, they are about results’, so begins the film’s first chapter spoken to a hollowed out, once grand facade of a railway station, its name still vividly written in Georgian, Abkhaz and Russian. Now it stands abandoned in an overgrown plot, shattered columns dangling precariously like broken limbs. This You Must Remember is a film that explores notions of suspended trauma and aftermath in post conflict Abkhazia, a de facto state, little known outside its immediate borders, in stasis since the Georgian-Abkhaz war (92/3). The external image of Abkhazia is most often reflected through the ruins and detritus of war that scar its cities and landscape. The film creates a counter narrative, drawing from the personal recollections of those who remain, who knew those ruins as homes and schools, as places of work and enjoyed places of leisure. Their memories, taken verbatim and reworked into narrative scripts, are retold by them through voice and acting performance, interleaved with historical footage and imagery of the place as it looks today. What emerges is an alternative form of documentary exploring notions of fragmented memory and psychological truth – a close-looking narrative that unfurls the traumatic process of ruination and the notion that any society’s stability is an enduring condition.