INNOCENCE OF MEMORIES

2015, 95”, produced by Janine Marmot and Keith Griffiths

Executive producers: Beatrice Bordone Bulgari – IN BETWEEN ART FILM, Marta Donzelli, Lizzie Francke, Amy Gardner, Teresa Gilchrist, Gregorio Paonessa, Keith Potter and Luciano Rigolini, partners: The British Film Institute, Bord Scannán Nah Éireann/ The Irish Film Board, In Between Art Film, Vivo Film, ARTE France – La Lucarne, Venom Films, Illuminations Films and Finite Films

GRANT GEE

Grant Gee is a filmmaker based in Brighton, England.
He has made documentaries about anarchists, rock groups, rock climbers and writers. His 1997 film Meeting People is Easy about Radiohead was nominated for a Grammy. He also directed the iconic music video for the group’s song No Surprises. His film Joy Division won the UK’s Grierson Award for Best Theatrical Documentary (2008). His film The Western Lands won Best Short Film at the Banff Film Festival (2008).
His 2012 film Patience (After Sebald), about WG Sebald’s unclassifiable masterpiece, The Rings of Saturn premiered at the New York Film Festival and enjoyed successful theatrical runs in both the UK and US. He is currently developing his first drama, an adaptation of Alison Moore’s The Lighthouse and Julio Cortazar’s Autonauts of the Cosmoroute.

ORHAN PAMUK

Orhan Pamuk is the author of eight novels, of the memoir Istanbul, and of three non-fictional works, and is the winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy praised Pamuk, ‘who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures.’

Considered one of Europe’s most prominent novelists, his work has been translated into over 60 languages and sold over twelve million copies worldwide. In Spring 2012, Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence opened in Istanbul. The culmination of a decade-long project, the museum is counterpart to the novel of the same name, and is accompanied by a catalogue, The Innocence of Objects, published by Abrams. In 2014, The Museum was the winner of European Museum of the Year Award.

Grant Gee’s Innocence of Memories (2015) is a beguiling, meditative study of the indelible link between memory and identity, and the transformative power of love.

Turkey’s Nobel laureate for Literature Orhan Pamuk opens a museum in Istanbul. A museum that’s a fiction: its objects trace a tale of doomed love in 1970s Istanbul, brought to life in his international best-selling novel The Museum of Innocence. The film takes us on a tour of the museum as the starting point for a trip through love stories, landscapes and the chemistry of the city. Writing, memory and architecture flow together in this sensual nocturnal wandering through the streets of Istanbul, which becomes a vibrant archive of its everyday life.

“Like many people, when I first visited Istanbul, I read Orhan Pamuk. From the very start, my view of the city was through the prism of his imagination. And I knew that Orhan had imagined a place called The Museum of Innocence and in 2008 published a big novel of that name. What I didn’t know was that two months after my first visit to Istanbul in 2012, Orhan would open the doors to the real Museum of Innocence. A real, 5-story museum of real objects – the debris and treasure of a tragic love affair from 30 years ago” — Grant Gee.