Julien Discrit: Edited Memories

›Edited Memories‹ takes us inside a care facility for Alzheimer’s patients in San Diego, California. Designed according to the principles of reminiscence therapy, it takes the form of a vast set recreating the 1950s and 60s, with the explicit aim of providing an immersive experience. A diner, a local pub, a pet shop, a town square—everything here is fabricated, or rather, everything is fiction. The film observes this singular therapeutic apparatus where the artifice of the setting merges with the residents’ authentic memories, generating a constant slippage between documentary and staging. The words captured in their repetition and fragility reveal the fundamental ambiguity of the place: is this a care facility or a film set? Are these patients, or actors replaying their own lives? This confusion—deliberately sustained through the editing—transforms the center into a soundstage where memory becomes performance, where recollection merges with its therapeutic mise-en-scène. The film thus questions what becomes of self-narrative when memory falters, when recollection slips away, hovering between the authenticity of lived experience and its possible construction. Yet it still attempts to reveal what persists: the irreducible singularity of each individual.