Voluntary Memory

Voluntary Memory (24 mins) collects and collates fragmented iPhone memories tracking a year in the life of the director working through CPTSD recovery. Abstracted audio snippets, visual clippings and notes to self bear raw meandering thoughts and visuals which speak to the spiralling density of human experience. The iPhone acts as the tool within this self-analytical, POV film; an experience akin to being inside another person's headspace and scrolling through their memories. It is a gaze at how trauma impacts the choices we make and the eyes through which we see and feel the world. It is a depiction of honest human experience lived in immediacy. The story journeys from safe to unsafe, dark to light as the narrator works on her spiralling path to recovery, or the beginning of the endless journey of ‘becoming the true self’. Voluntary Memory is evocative of our modern culture of recording and collecting self-motivated material, exposing our internal and private realities online and being always in contact with a recording device in our hands.