The Venice Days People’s Choice Award – determined by audience votes collected after each of the festival screenings – resulted this year in a tie.
In 2025, Crimea-born Vladlena Sandu, director of the documentary Memory, shares the award with Cyril Aris, director of the fiction feature A Sad and Beautiful World.
Memory is part of a series of films that Sandu has made about her own and her country’s past, and depicts her harrowing childhood experiences in war-torn Chechnya.
These experiences are frequently horrific in the extreme. As a child, after the divorce of her parents, the Crimea-born filmmaker moved to live in Grozny with her mother in the exact period when the Russian Federation was waging war against the Chechen Republic.
President Yeltsin had sent the Russian army to Chechnya in the 1990s, starting off a spiral of bloodshed. The death toll was huge.
Sandu, who has lived in Amsterdam for the past three and a half years, told Business Doc Europe in Venice that one reason she delayed learning to speak English was that, when she was a child, her original English teacher was killed right in front of her.
“I was 14 years old. Every time I tried to learn English afterwards, I had a trigger, going [back] to these bad memories,” she says. “My English is still broken. But it is enough to understand.”
Memory was originally intended to be a found footage, archive-based project, but it now includes poetic evocations of the filmmaker’s early childhood featuring young actors. There are also highly stylised reconstructions of some of the violence Sandu witnessed. For example, we see dolls decapitated, or with their limbs lopped off, or with axes in their heads. We hear her deadpan voice-over describing the most extreme events in a completely matter of fact way.
This is not the first time Sandu has dealt with family trauma. Her 2016 short documentary Holy God also looked back on a period when Grozny was being destroyed, reflecting on the experiences of the filmmaker, her mother and grandmother.
As if living through an apocalyptic war as a child wasn’t enough, Sandu was a victim of sex trafficking during her teenage years. She plans to deal with this grim episode in another film, provisionally titled The Rainbow Cinema and still at an early stage.
“The bad memories, I have a chance to look at them – and I feel myself more calm,” she explained to BDE how it helps her to confront the demons from her childhood in her art. Her hope with her filmmaking is to try to break “the circle of violence” that has for so long surrounded her. In particular, she wants to start discussions about children’s rights.
The film is produced by France-based Yanna Buryak of Limitless.
The true history of what went on in Grozny in the 90s isn’t often told – but Sandu was there, and saw the death and bloodshed unleashed by Yeltsin at first hand. “[We] agreed with each other we would make this project happen no matter what!” producer Buryak told BDE.
Following its success on the Venice Lido, Memory has already received invitations to several other major festivals.
“Hopefully, the great reviews we received in Venice will be convincing enough to distributors around Europe to support the film,” Buryak added of a documentary which now looks set to become an awards contender too.
