Thirty-year-old freelance radio journalist Sibilla travels to a village in Le Marche, central Italy. She plans to make an audio documentary about a shocking event that took place there in 1982, but the village is now little more than a ghost town—earthquakes and an artificial lake have destroyed much of it. Still, she tries to capture memories to create a soundscape of the past with her microphone. Little by little, the story emerges of a horrific murder that is part of her family history. The victim, a 14-year-old girl, was Sibilla’s aunt.
While the film documents the making of the audio documentary, it is also something more. Director Riccardo Giacconi turns the true-crime genre inside out in its search for silence, not sensation. The silences fall in the conversations Sibilla records, but also in her own search for the truth. But does she really want to know the truth?
Is the story even true? In the mysterious Memories of Lightning, that remains far from certain. Anchored by a carefully crafted soundtrack, this quiet film raises questions about fiction and reality, memory and imagination.
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