Memory Also Die

Forum Expanded Exhibition 2020

Memory Also Die, the first part of a trilogy that focuses on memory as political taboo, comes fifty years after the collective trauma responsible for the death of memory in Nigeria: Biafra. What is it about the present that makes us unwilling to let the past go? Among the Igbo-speaking people of eastern Nigeria there exists a word: “Echezona,” which simply means “never forget.” There is the possibility of a deeper meaning – the way it is used in these films: it is taboo to forget.
Using appropriated archival film footage layered with personal text, the film takes as its point of departure the old idea that the personal is political – in the sense that collective forgetting is a politically sponsored act. The 1970s – the post-Biafra-war era – were a period of economic boom, marked by a strange mix of optimism, dreams, and ambition on the one hand, and of defeat, disillusionment, and despair on the other. It was also a time of silence, a time of forgetting, a time of migration and exile from memory. Official history had encouraged collective silence, collective forgetting, collective migration from memory.

by Didi Cheeka Nigeria 2016 English 6’ Colour & Black/White World premiere | Documentary form

Crew

Director	Didi Cheeka
Montage	Didi Cheeka
Producer	Didi Cheeka

Produced by

AlternativCinema

Didi Cheeka

Didi Cheeka, born in 1971 in the eastern Nigerian state of Anambra, is an off-Nollywood filmmaker and critic. He is the editor of Lagos Film Review, co-founder and curator of Lagos Film Society – an alternative cinema center dedicated to the founding of Nigeria’s first arthouse cinema –, and artistic director of Decasia – 1st Berlin-Lagos Archival Film Festival. His ongoing projects are the documentary War on Memory: The Forgotten History of Nigeria’s Post-War Cinema and the fiction feature In Silence & In Tears. Cheeka is currently engaged in digitizing Nigeria’s rediscovered national audiovisual archives. He is an alumnus of the Berlinale Talents and mostly lives and works in Lagos.

Filmography

2005 Daughters of the Veil; 27 min. 2007 Lonely is the Night; 75 min. 2010 Bloodstones; 20 min. 2011 Lilies of the Ghetto; with Ubaka Joseph Ugochukwu, 84 min. 2019 Bloodstones (Redux); 80 min. 2020 Memory Also Die; 6 min.

Bio- & filmography as of Berlinale 2020