DIRECTORS STATEMENT BY JOSH APPIGNANESI, Writer/Director

EX MEMORIA is based on recollections of my grandmothers last years which she spent in a home for ageing Jews - a very moving place. Her story could be told a hundred different ways. In this film I wanted to side-step standard narrative and dramatic means, in favour of a more direct and immersive approach.

The film is stark and challenging. We are both fascinated and repelled at being forced to look in closeup at an old woman's face for the duration. An audience will have to do some work filling in the meanings for ourselves - and this can be uncomfortable. But I believe it makes for a much more memorable film.

I wanted to force us to look at our lead character Eva's face, with almost no cuts, for 15 minutes. It's a face of absence, but with history written directly onto it. We are physcially immersed in her world and feel for ourselves the incredible slowness, the social invisibility, and the brief flashes of lucidity and emotion that light up her face.

At first Eva seems cut off from the world. But what the film shows is that if we look closely, and take the time to really attend to a person with dementia, she is in fact responsive in many different ways. It's the world that is cutting itself off from her, as much as the other way around.  I wanted to show how much small gestures and a little extra attention can mean to someone in that position.

Alzheimers and the plight of the elderly are crucial topics and I wanted to document what they're actually like, how they're felt. Socially Eva is practically non-existent. The film itself goes some way to rectifying that.