Beat Film Festival presents: “Innocence of Memories” by Grant Gee
97 min, UK, 2015
'Coolly intelligent and noirishly compelling' – Empire
Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design
Bersenevskaya embankment, 14, Moscow
3 June at 22.00 as part of the 3-day Future of the Word Forum, devoted to new perspectives on reading culture, the publishing industry and creative literary process in the UK and Russia.
Orhan Pamuk, Turkey's renowned Nobel Laureate for Literature, created the Museum of Innocence in Istanbul’s winding backstreets. This unique institution is dedicated to a fictional doomed love story set in 1970's Istanbul. The crowded museum it is the book made real: consciously blurring the lines of fiction and reality with real, tangible artefacts: from 4,213 cigarette butts in a glass case to a collection of antique salt shakers.
Director Grant Gee interlaces the story of this unique institution's genesis with that of the romantic encounter that inspired it, a meditation on the city itself, and Pamuk's relationship to all three. Documentary and archive footage, interviews with the writer, enactments of the doomed love adventures of the couple, a poetic look at the objects in the museum: all that takes the viewers on an elegant and dreamily sensuous tour of memory, longing, love and loss.