Today, the drama film "The Box of Memories" directed by cross-border directors Joanna Haji Thomas and Khalil Joaig has an exclusive online premiere. The movie tells the story of a young girl named Alex who receives a "Box of Memories" from Lebanon at Christmas. While uncovering the secrets of the box, she also discovers the secrets that her mother and grandmother have kept silent for many years.
One of the highlights of "Box of Memories" comes from the "Box of Memories" itself. In the film, Haji Thomas and Joe Eger used real words and images recorded during their time in Lebanon to restore to the audience the adolescence of a Lebanese dreaming girl who was bombed by war. At the 71st Berlin International Film Festival, "Box of Memories" was nominated for the highest Golden Bear Award in the main competition.
In contrast to many films about the Lebanese civil war, the tone of "A Box of Memories" is not sombre or accusatory. It is like vindicating the name of the Lebanese youth of that era. Outside of the war, they were rebellious by nature, grew up barbaric, and had their own love and pain, just like teenagers in any corner of the world.
Thousands of photos hide memories, my mother’s adolescence was too wild to imagine
On a snowy Christmas, Alex’s family living in Montreal, Canada, received a strange package—a large parcel sent from her hometown of Lebanon. box. Grandma's expression suddenly changed when she saw the address, and her mother Maya fell into an emotional breakdown after discovering the box.
Under Alex's repeated questioning, Maya finally confessed that the diary in the box was the diary she sent to her friend Lisa during the war. Driven by curiosity, Alex stole the box of memories against her mother's wishes.
Through the contents of the box of memories, Alex returns to Lebanon in the 1980s. Maya, an innocent girl, wants to keep in touch with her friend Lisa who has moved to Paris. Maya vows to be Lisa's eyes and record everything that happens every day.
Reading between the lines of her mother's words, Alex discovered that her adolescent mother had the same troubles as her. She loves to dream, loves to talk back to her parents, learns to secretly smoke, and has a group of good sisters.
During the days when the city was bombed, Maya hid in the countryside and endured her parents' endless quarrels. While wandering the streets with her friends, she met his first love, Raja.
's fascination with Raja saves Maya from the gloom of war and the pain of her parents losing their son. Her secret love affair with Raja soon aroused her parents' disapproval. Maya and Raja firmly believe that love can defeat everything and always date secretly despite the risk of bombing.
As the war escalates, the familiar world around Maya becomes increasingly deformed. After all, personal struggle cannot withstand the tide of the times, and Maya and her family are soon involved in the torrent...
"Box of Memories" asks a question that many of us have wondered: Our parents, when they became What kind of youth did they have before becoming "boring adults"? What makes their passion wear out?
From 1982 to 1988, Hadji Thomas had a close friend who moved to Paris. They exchanged letters for 6 years, and then lost contact for 25 years. When they met again, Haji Thomas discovered that they both kept diaries from that year.
Thereafter, Hadji Thomas's Diary of a Teenage Girl became her daughter's favorite read. But the daughter soon discovered that there was a big difference between the image of her mother in the diary and the mother she actually came into contact with.
Haji Thomas and Joe Egger soon thought that they could use these diaries to create a film that blurs the boundaries between the real and the virtual. In "Box of Memories", photos, old newspapers, video tapes, and first-person narration are mixed together to form the entire life of an adolescent girl. The war made her life take a turn for the worse, but it did not dampen her passion for life.
In addition, the two directors also used their identities as artists to give full imagination to Beirut at that time. The artistic bombing effects and the moving old photos give the past of Lebanon a vitality that is different from documentary materials.
"Box of Memories" is not only a work that recalls the past, it also carries the collective memories of that generation of Lebanese youth. The new generation of children will always discover the stories of the past with their own eyes. Soon, children will discover that crazy and melancholy youth is a proposition that every generation will experience. Reincarnation after reincarnation, nothing is different.
The dance of the new and the old, "re-opening the box of memories from the heart"
"The Lebanese civil war has lasted for 15 years, and we have grown up in the conflict... Through "The Box of Memories", we hope to create something different from the documentary The sense of alienation, we hope to record all this from the perspective of a teenager. We hope to use today's tools to activate that era." Haji Thomas said.
In "Box of Memories", Hadji Thomas intentionally creates an intertext between "new" and "old". Alex's chatting with her friends on the phone corresponds to Maya's diary in the movie talking to her friends over the air. Alex's lovelorn relationship and Maya's first love are a contrast between the same emotions in different times.
This kind of comparison allows young people to better understand the story of "Box of Memories" and empathize with the characters in the story, and also injects new vitality into the story.
In "Box of Memories", the three identities of grandmother, mother and daughter form a chain of inheritance familiar to the audience. The grandmother is trapped in her hometown, the mother closes herself off, and the daughter cannot intervene. Three generations of this family were trapped in the trauma of that year in different ways.
The process of opening the "box of memories" is a moment when family feelings are passed down, and it is also a moment when the family "re-understands" each other from the heart. Just as the new dawn sweeps away the gloom, the riots of the civil war have passed, and a new era is waiting for new people to write.
Lebanon has experienced an economic and political double whammy in the wake of the pandemic, with Haji Thomas also losing his production company. The anger inside supported her to continue to complete film creation. Joanna Hadj Thomas and Khalil Joaig, the film partners who have known each other since the end of the Lebanese Civil War in the 1980s, determined to use film and art to fight against the undocumented and unrecorded violence at the end of the Lebanese Civil War. People care about the consequences.
There are many themes that record Lebanese movies, but the valuable thing about "Box of Memories" is that it does not just describe the trauma caused by the war, but uses the vitality of teenagers to prevent the shining points of that generation from being reduced to history books. The description above is empty. As Haji Thomas said, knowing how to maintain this vitality is also a very important thing.
The movie "Box of Memories" has been exclusively broadcast on Huanxi Premiere. As a selected movie platform that combines membership and paid on-demand, Huanxi Premiere selects high-quality film and television content at home and abroad for Internet users. Domestic masterpieces such as "Man Jiang Hong" and " "Manslaughter", "One Second", "Crazy Alien", "Win the Championship", "The Party at Southern Station", "The Sky of the Wind Dog", etc., overseas masterpieces such as "Night of the King", "Asol", "Customized Boyfriend", All Creatures" etc. At present, Huanxi Premiere has covered three major terminals: PC, mobile and TV, with a total download count of more than 38 million and a cumulative paying users of more than 11 million.
Huanxi Premiere is a streaming media playback platform owned by Huanxi Media. As an innovative film and television content investment, production and streaming media playback platform company, Huanxi Media has always adhered to the two-wheel-driven development strategy of "content + channels".
Huanxi Media is working steadily on the main strategy of "Content is King" and is committed to developing high-quality and diversified film and television works through working with outstanding directors and professional creative teams. Huanxi Media's first production of "Man Jiang Hong" has a cumulative box office of 4.5 billion yuan, becoming The 2023 Spring Festival box office champion, ranking sixth on the box office list in Chinese film history; produced by Huanxi Media, produced and starred by Huang Bo, written and directed by Su Liang, starring Shan Yuhao, Yan Ni, Zhang Junning, Zhang Zixian, Wan Qian, Wang Xun The movie "School Dad", a special appearance and friendly appearance by Wu Lei, was released nationwide on August 18. It received rave reviews and received the highest rating of the year on Zhihu with a recommendation rate of 94% from Zhihu friends. The current box office has reached nearly 600 million.
The 2023 film list announced by Huanxi Media also includes: "Mr. Red Carpet" directed by Ning Hao and starring Andy Lau. The film will have its world premiere at the 2023 Toronto Film Festival and has been invited to participate in the 28th Busan International Film Festival. Closing film; "Alone" directed by Chen Kexin, starring Hu Ge, Vincent Cassel and Hao Lei; "Hedgehog" directed by Gu Changwei, starring Ge You and Wang Junkai; "In the Name of the Father" directed by Chen Daming, starring Zhang Hanyu; directed by Chen Peisi "The Stage" starring Zhang Guoli; "Morning Clouds and Mud Rain" directed and written by Zhang Guoli, starring Zhou Dongyu; "Safe Evacuation from the 21st Century" directed by Li Yang, starring Zhang Ruoyun and Zhong Chuxi; "Up the Mountain" produced by Wang Xiaoshuai and directed by Wu Di, etc. level video.
In addition, we have successively cooperated with Maoyan, the new film media platform 1905 Movie Network under the Central Propaganda Film Satellite Channel Program Production Center (CCTV6), BesTV TV terminal, ByteDance, Bilibili, Huawei, Xiaomi, Mango TV, China After reaching strategic cooperation with China Mobile, XGIMI Projector, Skyworth, Hisense, TCL, etc., Huanxi Media is also actively entering the new track of in-vehicle video entertainment, and has successively cooperated with Banma Zhixing and many car brands to continuously explore new channels and obtain "Head Internet platform + hardware terminal" multi-channel traffic support continues to amplify the long-tail effect of movie content and accelerate the release of platform value.
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