Experiencing Interruptions?

See Memory

See Memory is an exploration of the power of memory in our lives and how traumatic memories can prevent us from living fully in the present and envisioning our futures. The film offers a roadmap for changing our relationship to memory and regaining hope and agency. See Memory is made out of 30,000 hand painted stills that accompanies narration from interviews with leading neuroscientists and psychiatrists. The film gives voice to the experience of deciphering fragmented memories through a unifying lens of art and science.

Synopsis: A lonely young woman moving hesitantly through the liminal space between past and present. A therapist bears witness to her trauma and the girl is transformed - she does not have to live with those memories alone anymore. No longer stuck between past and present, she strides hopefully towards a future of her own making.

  • Viviane Silvera
    Director
  • Viviane Silvera
    Writer
  • Jon Cornick
    Producer
    State and Main, Bolden!, The Scarlett Letter, Hick, The Propsal, Lymelife, Louis,
  • Viviane Silvera
    Producer
  • Paul Browde
    Key Cast
    Paternal Instinct
  • Eric Kandel
    Key Cast
    In Search Of Memory
  • Silvana Riggio
    Key Cast
  • Daniela Schiller
    Key Cast
    The Ripple Effect
  • Cheryl Dolinger Brown
    Key Cast
  • Gerald Epstein
    Key Cast
  • Lauren Dunitz
    Key Cast
    Wartime
  • Project Type:
    Animation, Documentary, Experimental, Short
  • Runtime:
    14 minutes 27 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    September 5, 2016
  • Production Budget:
    20,000 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    United States
  • Country of Filming:
    United States
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    1:78
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    Yes
  • Student Project:
    No
  • American Psychological Association Film Festival
    Denver, CO
    United States
    August 4, 2016
    Colorado Premiere
  • Imagine Science Film Festival
    New York
    United States
    October 15, 2016
    New York
  • Viten Film Festival
    Bergen
    Norway
    November 5, 2016
    European Premiere
  • Awareness Film Festival
    Los Angeles
    United States
    October 15, 2017
    Los Angeles
  • Chicago Art House Film Festival
    Chicago
    United States
    October 14, 2016
Director Biography - Viviane Silvera

VIVIANE SIVERA is an artist and filmmaker whose intention is to give voice to universal experiences of imagining and remembering while exploring scientific discoveries that can fundamentally change our relationship to memory.

Silvera has exhibited her work for 22 years, most recently at Berlin Art Week, the Edward Hopper House, the Albright Knox, Dahesh, and Masur Museums, and El Museo de la Ciudad - Mexico. Her videos have been installed at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, MGM National Harbor, Sarah Lawrence College, University of Mary Washington, The Cube Art Project with Union Bank, 4Culture Gallery in Pioneer Square, Seattle, Altspace VR (Microsoft’s VR Platform), Joe’s Pub at the Public Theatre,and Davidson College, among other venues. Her hand painted film See Memory screened in the Imagine Science Film Festival, among many other film festivals and is distributed through New Day Films. Her videos have been licensed by McCann Advertising and installed in hotels, universities, and museums across the globe.

Silvera has received numerous grants and awards, including the 2013 Award of Excellence in Painting from the Edward Hopper House, the Chaim Gross, Valerie Delacorte, and Harriet Whitney Frishmuth Awards from the National Academy School of Fine Arts, a Fantasy Foundation Grant, and a Newington Cropsey Grant. Her work has been written about in the Art Daily, The Wall Street Journal, Gotham Magazine, Fine Art Connoisseur, Time Out New York and The New York Times and was the cover and featured interview in Gambling the Aisle Literary magazine and the subject of a 36 page spread in Art Habens Review in 2019.

Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Clinton Presidential Library & Museum, the Van Every Smith Galleries at Davidson College, Vanderbilt University’s "Garden of Great Ideas, the Ziff Davis Corporate Collection and Tribeca Flashpoint Media Academy. Silvera’s outdoor sculpture “The Fault” was commissioned by and permanently installed for the Women’s Studies Department at Vanderbilt University, where she collaborated with landscape designers, architects, and engineers to realize her design.

She is currently at work on the film series Feel Memory, which combines hand painted animation with live action, archival and first person narration to tell the stories of people who are trapped by traumatic memories and freed by imagination.

Silvera earned a BS from Tufts University in Political Science and Psychology and an MFA from the New York Academy of Art. She was born in Hong Kong and raised in Brazil. Presently based in New York City with her family. She is Founder and Director of On Art.

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Director Statement

I was born and raised in Hong Kong where I lived until I was 10. I then moved to Brazil for 5 years before landing in New York at the age of 15. My Hong Kong memories are often out of my reach. If memory is the story we tell of how we became who we are, who are you if your memories are not within your grasp? I set out to make See Memory to come to terms with my own fraught relationship to memory.

“Speak Memory” by neurologist Oliver Sacks, explores his childhood memories as a melding of his experiences and things he heard or read about. Emotion is the strongest encoder of memory. If you hear a story that triggers a strong emotion, you may absorb pieces of it as your own. Sacks explains that neurologically, there is no way to decipher experienced memory from imagined memory. I wanted to find out more. In interviews with psychiatrists and neuroscientists I asked - How do we remember and why do we remember?

I made See Memory with the belief that the need to understand memory and how it shapes who we are is universal. The film combines art and science, giving a vivid and visceral experience of what it is to remember and be haunted as well as enriched by our memories.