The Weight of the Past – Piecing Together Memories and Processing Trauma in the Documentary Film White Lies

The article examines Alba Zari’s documentary film White Lies (2025) as an example of artistic and autobiographical exploration of family trauma, personal identity and memory. Through reconstructing her personal history, the filmmaker uncovers her family’s involvement with the Children of God sect and the consequences of this involvement. The concepts of memory work and postmemory are used to help us understand the transmission of trauma, the filmmaker’s actions and her artistic processes. By exploring the family archive of photographs and VHS tapes and interviewing her family members, Alba Zari discovers her own history and identity. The film uses silence, the absence of words and respectful distance to create an emphatic space to understand complex family relations and the intergenerational transmission of trauma.

The integral version of this article can be found in the printed KINO!