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Panic!: Memoria

  • Tuesday, October 1, 2024 / 7:00 PM - 10:00 PM (PDT)
  • Pollock Theater
  • Screening Format: 4K digital projection (136 minutes)
  • With Javier Umpierrez (sound editor)
  • Director: Apichatpong Weerasethakul
     Starring: Tilda Swinton, Elkin Díaz, Jeanne Balibar
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Part of the CWC Global series Part of the CWC Presents series

Memoria (2021), the most recent feature from Palme d’Or-winning filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, follows Scottish orchid farmer Jessica Holland (Tilda Swinton) over the course of a trip to visit her sister in Bogotá, Colombia. After Jessica is startled awake by a loud bang that only she is able to hear, she becomes afflicted with a mysterious sensory syndrome. Unable to sleep and increasingly fixated on locating the source of the strange sound, Jessica traverses Bogotá and the surrounding jungle. Along the way, she befriends an archaeologist named Agnes (Jeanne Balibar) and a fish scaler named Hernán (Elkin Díaz).

Delicate, hyponotic, and anchored by a restrained lead performance from Swinton, Memoria excavates the strange ways we become attuned to our physical and emotional worlds. Plumbing the lower frequencies of sensory experience and tapping the quieter forms of uncertainty and anxiety that flourish there, Memoria is an engrossing puzzle from one of today’s most singular cinematic voices.

Sound editor Javier Umpierrez joined moderator Greg Siegel (Film and Media Studies, UCSB) for a post-screening discussion of Umpierrez’s work on Memoria.

Biographies

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Sound editor Javier Umpierrez

Javier Umpierrez has always been drawn to the power of audio storytelling. After first developing a love for the abstract and imaginative world of radio, he later became fascinated by the power of sound to heighten and enrich images, to create a world within a film, and to extend a movie beyond the screen. For the last thirteen years, he has worked as a sound designer, supervising sound editor, re-recording mixer, and (sometimes) composer. In that time, he has supervised and designed sound for narrative films, documentaries, TV series and advertisements in Mexico, as well as France, Puerto Rico, and Colombia. In recent years, his film projects have screened in festivals all over the world, including Cannes (where Memoria won the 2021 Jury Prize), Berlin, Rotterdam, Sundance, Tribeca, Toronto, and Venice. In advertising, he has worked for brands like Toyota, Harley Davidson, Dobel, Nestle, Corona, and Fiat.

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Moderator Greg Siegel (Film and Media Studies, UCSB)

Greg Siegel researches and teaches in media history and theory, science and technology studies, cultural and critical theory, and sound studies. He is the author of Forensic Media: Reconstructing Accidents in Accelerated Modernity (Duke University Press, 2014). His essays have appeared in Cabinet, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Discourse, Grey Room, Rethinking Disney: Private Control, Public Dimensions (Wesleyan University Press, 2005), The Routledge Companion to Media and Risk, and Television and New Media. He is currently writing a book on the cultural history of unexplained sounds.

 This event is sponsored by the Carsey-Wolf Center.

CWC Presents: Panic!

The Carsey-Wolf Center’s 2024-25 feature series Panic! explores the complex relationship between media, an anxious public, and the turbulent currents of social, cultural, and moral panic. The series will examine how such panics have appeared on screen over the decades, but also consider how the screen itself—as technology, as gathering space, and as a site of fantasy and desire—becomes the object of reactionary backlash. Panic! will be a yearlong showcase of the films, discourses, and cultural practices that have tested the limits of public acceptability, and that have much to teach us about the cycles of panic that define our own political moment.

CWC Global

Media are global by nature; they express culture just as much as they transcend borders. The CWC Global series is dedicated to showcasing media from around the world. This series features screenings and events that place UCSB in conversation with international media makers and global contexts across our deeply connected world.

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