Memento (2000) by Christopher Nolan is a slick, multi-award winning mystery thriller that was nominated for 2 Oscars (screenplay and editing).

Complex, polished and sometimes disorientating, the story adopts a contemporary film-noir aesthetic that grips viewers from start to finish. And the story? IMDB’s description is pretty brief: “A man with short-term memory loss attempts to track down his wife’s murderer.” Honestly, it’s better not to know more than this. Because watching Memento for the first time offers an intense and absorbing kaleidoscopic journey that takes in concepts like memory and identity, life and death, and much in between. After the film we will discuss twin questions: who are you, and how can you be sure? In Narrative Identity, the philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1991) describes ‘identity’ as stories we tell about ourselves, that fuse history and fiction. Art, he said, offers us the desperately sought mediation between the permanence we seek (we want to be something) and inevitable change (we never stop developing). Join us as we untangle these stories in the film and in ourselves: all are welcome, topics will be accessible, and no prior knowledge of philosophy is required.