AIFF on the Small Screen: Embers

Embers

Embers
Find it on:  Netflix | Amazon | iTunes
Feature
86 minutes
Director: Claire Carré
Year: 2015
Country: Poland, USA
embersmovie.com

Five interwoven stories explore the search for meaning and connection in a world with no memory. A devastating global neurological epidemic leaves all who survive with profound amnesia. Those who remain navigate a decaying urban landscape, unable to recall the past or create new memories. Two lovers wake up in bed and in love each morning, but with no memory of each other. A young man is overcome by violent impulses he has no context for. A father and his beautiful daughter retain their identities, but only because they live in a bunker they can never leave. Each finds a way to cope with life in a perpetual present, where meaning must be experienced moment by moment.

Director’s Statement: Claire Carré

I wanted to make my first feature film about something that matters to me on a core level, and kept coming back to memory as the corner-stone of my personal identity. Whether affected by a memory disease or healthy, we all forget all the time. That’s part of being human. Embers takes forgetting to a more dramatic extreme to bring the relationship between memory and identity into focus. Sometimes the best way to understand ourselves is to take a step back and make the familiar strange so we can rediscover what makes each of us who we are.