THE MEMORY BLOCKS
A FILM BY ANDREW KÖTTING – 76 minutes - 2025
Commissioned through FUTURE SCREENS NI & Ulster University.
The Memory Blocks is an experimental feature film that dives into the murky waters of memory. The film-maker’s daughter Eden, dressed as Dorothy from The Wizard of OZ walks a path of recollection but she does not walk alone. On her journey she is accompanied by workers from a factory that produces memory and a voiceover that attempts to explain….
And all the while she uses a simple sign language to convey meaning or misunderstanding:
What is a Memory Block?
Is it a block choc-a-bloc with memory?
Or is it a memory blockage which therefore prevents memory?
Or is it both?
Working again with his daughter Eden, ‘star’ of Gallivant, This Our Still Life and The Whalebone Box, the artist and film-maker explores notions of memory and recall as interpreted through the precarious lens of neuro-diversity.
Eden and her colleagues from the Project Artworks collective; Charlie, Michelle and Neville take us on a journey, ferrying fragments of meaning back and forth, stitching time into a singular experimental feature whilst all the while having a right laugh.
There is also Becki, the Makaton tutor who helps Eden to sign her missives whilst intermittently a gaggle of Folkloricists, resplendent in their own hand-made costumes pop up to confuse and beguile. And then there is the factory, which sets about the business of manufacturing memory blocks….
The film navigates the thin membrane between fiction and documentary, celebrating other ways of being and thinking. Mary Wild, a film scholar specialising in psychoanalysis and cinema also lends her voice intermittently and through her analytical insight contributes to the film’s meditation on memory and perception.
Original archival recollections in the form of salvaged Super 8, shot in the Yemen by Eden’s Grandparents who were stationed there in the 60’s also meanders in and out of the machine of memory along with deftly modeled CGI of The Blocks.
What is a memory but a delicate machine, a workshop of times-gone, assembled in whispers and fragments? Might memories be both blocked and stored within the factory of folk-lore?
“These are intangibles that the moment you name them their meaning evaporates like jellyfish in the sun.”
Andrei Tarkovsky on Stalker.
CREDITS
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER
PAUL MOORE
PRODUCER
ANDREW KÖTTING
PRODUCER – NORTHERN IRELAND
TERESA KANE
PRODUCTION ASSISTANT - NORTHERN IRELAND
KRISTIN O’DONNELL
ULSTER UNIVERSITY COORDINATOR
CAROLINE HARKIN
DEIRDRE MACFADYEN
WITH
EDEN KÖTTING
CHARLIE STEPHENS
NEVILLE JERMYN
MICHELLE ROBERTS
BOB HUMM
CLAIRE HUMM
CHRIS BROUGHTON
LORNA CRABBE
IVY BROUGHTON CRABBE
BECKI LANE
LEILA MCMILLAN
WHITE COATS - FACTORY
SIMON CHARTERTON
PHILIPPE CIOMPI
JENNIE ROBERTS
WHITE COATS - NORTHERN IRELAND
BEN COPES
CARENZA GAMBLE
SZENTLÉLEKI GELLÉRT
MAYA KELLY
JUDE MCAULEY-SMINCAK
LIBBY MCDONALD
LAUREN MCAULEY
ADAM MILLIGAN
JONNY ROGERS
RESIDENTS OF BROOKLANDS CARE HOME KILKEEL
EDNA MCCLUNG
DAVID MCCORMICK
LILY MCKNIGHT
SYLVIA OLIVER
MARY ROCKS
MALCOLM SHILLIDAY
NORA SMITH
ULSTER STUDIOS
GERARD DUNLEAVY
LUCY BELLE RODGERS
SCRIPT – WORDS
ANDREW KÖTTING
MARY WILD
CAMERAS
NICK GORDON SMITH
&
ANONYMOUS BOSCH
TIM CORRIGAN
ALAN CROSS
ANDREW KÖTTING
EDEL O’MAHONY
SUPER 8 ARCHIVE
SANDY MCMILLAN
JAN MCMILLAN
PINHOLE CAMERAS
ANONYMOUS BOSCH
DRONES
ANDY YOONG
ALAN CROSS
3D MODELLING & ANIMATION
ISABELLE SKINNER
EDIT & SOUND DESIGN
ANDREW KÖTTING
VOICES
EDEN KÖTTING
MARY WILD
CLAUDIA BARTON
MAHNOOR SHABAN
ANDREW KÖTTING
MUSIC – SOUNDS
DAVID BLOOR & DIRCH BLEWN
CLAUDIA BARTON
ANDREW KÖTTING
SIMON CHARTERTON
JEM FINER
AFTER FX - TEXTS
ZEROH
COLOUR GRADE
ALAN CROSS
FACTORY LOCATION & MEMORY BLOCK CONSULTANT
KEITH & KH ENGINEERING LTD
END CREDIT MUSIC
JEM FINER
WITH THANKS TO
JAN MCMILLAN
SANDY MCMILLAN
MARK FRENCH
ALNOOR DEWSHI
NICK JOHNSON
PAT SEAMEAN
PAUL PRINTER
JIM LEDWITH
RAYMOND SHANNON
CLIO BARNARD
GED BRYAN
ANTHONY DEVLIN & ALL AT THE SILENT VALLEY RESERVOIR
ALL AT PROJECT ARTWORKS
GERARD DUNLEAVY
SHELBOURNE VEHICLE RENTAL
EDEN’S SUPPORT TEAM
HAZEL JAMES
RACHEL MCCARRON
JEMMA, GRA, BEL & LUCAS TILLER
JEMMA MILLARD
BECI LANE
CAROL LUSCOMBE
THERESA CARUNA
ALBERTINE KÖTTING-MCMILLAN
THE MEMORY BLOCKS
The Factory and the Journey
The factory hums, not as a relic of industry, but as the universe's engine—where existence is both conceived and dismantled. Its machinery doesn’t merely forge memory blocks; it composes symphonies of time, space, and self. Each cog, each piston, a heartbeat in the continuum, its rhythm reverberates into the journey beyond.
But the journey is no escape; it is the echo, the parallel existence. Factory and procession are intertwined like twin strands of DNA, coiling and uncoiling through the liminal spaces between them. Invisible currents—an electric, unseen highway—ferry fragments of meaning back and forth, stitching time into a singular, spiraling form. The figures who walk are as much a product of the factory as the factory is shaped by their movement. One informs the other endlessly, a dance of creation and deconstruction.
The Figurine and the Ego
Eden’s figurine, delicate yet commanding, appears whole until it shatters—a happenstance or divine necessity. Its fracture, its dislocation, is the essence of the work: to dismantle, to reduce to the elemental. This process, while comical, holds a paradoxical truth: the figurine, grand and tangible, crumbles with ease, yet the imperceptible memory blocks endure.
Here lies the allegory of the ego, a brittle edifice dressed in grandeur, pretending permanence. The smashing of the figurine is a liberation—a rupture revealing the subatomic psyche, where true resilience resides. To see past the ego’s masquerade is to touch the eternal, where the soul emerges in its unadorned, unbreakable form.
Knitting and the Threads of Being
Leila’s knitting—her quiet, repetitive act—unfurls like a strand of DNA, extending the self into the world. Each loop and weave a manifestation of care, a thread binding mother to daughter, past to future, spirit to material. She knits not merely a scarf but the strands of continuity, a safety net for Eden’s journey.
The rhythm of her hands mirrors creation itself, a maternal echo of the factory’s machinery. Yet where the factory’s pulse is industrial, hers is intimate, nurturing. She stitches the fabric of memory and belonging, grounding Eden in an ever-extending lineage of love and protection. Her knitting becomes the DNA of their bond, unbreakable even as it stretches outward into the unknown.
Insects and the Microscopic Lens
Beneath the vast landscapes, beneath the grand arc of the procession, the lens tightens, focusing on the minuscule: a beetle, a fly, crawling in their enigmatic precision. These creatures, observed under a metaphysical microscope, are echoes of the film itself. They are interruptions that are not interruptions—tiny manifestations of evolution, both in nature and in the psyche.
They burrow into the soil of the soul, scratching at something unresolved, something primal. They are reminders of the infinite regress of self-inquiry, the journey inward as vast as the cosmos outward. In their scuttling movements, the unseen is revealed, the minuscule given monumental significance.
The Shadow and the Heroine
The figure in white—Eden’s shadow—is no antagonist but an essential companion. She is not a person but the negation of the Persona, the mask stripped away to reveal the unvarnished soul. Her presence speaks of courage, of integration, for Eden walks the world not in denial of her shadow but in communion with it.
As Carl Jung once said, the shadow, though feared, holds the key to transformation. To embrace it is to transcend the brittle mask of ego, to embark on the enantiodromia, the turning of opposites. Eden’s journey becomes heroic in the truest sense, for she does not flee her shadow but carries it, wearing it like a second skin as she steps deeper into the unknown.
Mary Wild @psycstar
patreon.com/marywild
