Aman Johnson wrote and directed this short film about trying to hold onto the memories of those you love. It had it’s world premiere at the academy-qualifying Austin Film Festival in 2019.

Note from the Director:

“The idea for this film slowly developed over time but took on personal meaning when my father passed away a few months before my son was born. I have always been fascinated by memories and the inherently tragic juxtaposition of their importance and their fragility. The idea of losing a loved one is heartbreaking, but the idea of slowly losing precious memories over time seemed to me to be a different kind of suffering.

I wanted to write a story about this unique kind of loss, but it didn’t entirely come together for me until I read a book about memory competitions. I was fascinated by how the use of mind palaces allowed participants to remember an immense amount of information and retain that information much longer than they would normally.I was also captivated by the idea of creating physical spaces with in your mind –architecture untethered from reality and built solely from memories for memories.

At that point, the concept of the film became a series of questions for me. What if a child tried to use a mind palace to save the memories of their father? What would it feel like to travel through that mind palace over the years, revisiting those precious moments? And what would it feel like to begin losing those memories –one at a time–no matter how hard you tried to keep them? What would it feel like to wake up one day to the realization that the loss of those memories is unavoidable? And how would you find solace in that tragic realization?”