SFCINEMATHEQUE

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Thursday, December 14, 1995

Re Presenting Memory

Tell Me What You Saw

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts





Winner of a 1995 Golden Gate Award, Finnish director Kiti Luostarinen’s Tell Me What You Saw explores the common past of her family—five sisters, a brother and a mother suffering from dementia—only to reveal the instability and partiality of all memory. The siblings have radically different narratives of their shared history, disagreeing on vital questions such as which parent was abusive. Ultimately we are left with an uneasy sense of the uncertainty of all reconstructions of the past. Followed by Srinivas Krishna’s lyrical tribute to Luostarinen’s film also entitled Tell Me What You Saw; plus Barbara Hammer’s Optic Nerve and Phil Solomon’s Remains to be Seen which optically recreate the ephemeral and transient nature of remembering.