About Past Sundance: Memoria
A Scottish orchid grower visiting her sister in Bogotá is woken up at four in the morning by a deep metallic boom that nobody else hears. Tilda Swinton walks across Colombia trying to find the source of the sound; Apichatpong Weerasethakul makes you wait for it.
Released in 2021 and running a tight 2h 16m, Past Sundance: Memoria sits firmly in the drama tradition that American art-house cinemas have spent the last two decades quietly defending. The film is rated PG and presented in English. Read a contemporary review — useful before you book a ticket.
Director: Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Apichatpong Weerasethakul belongs to the cohort of directors whose work tends to land first at festivals — Sundance, Locarno, the New York Film Festival, SXSW — before opening on a small handful of screens in New York and Los Angeles and then rolling out, week by week, to the independent circuit elsewhere in the country. Past Sundance: Memoria is part of that pipeline. It is the only title from Apichatpong Weerasethakul currently in our directory; if you want to keep tabs on the director's other work, follow the festival circuit notes from the criticism outlets linked at the bottom of this page.
Cast
The principal cast — Tilda Swinton, Elkin Díaz, Jeanne Balibar — is the kind of ensemble that art-house audiences will recognize from adjacent festival titles. Independent casting tends to favor performers who can carry a long take, hold a quiet scene, and trust a director's control of pace; this film is no exception. Cast notes and credits are useful for tracking through other adjacent indie work.
Where to watch Past Sundance: Memoria
Currently playing in 12 US cities across our directory. The deepest scheduling is in:
- Minneapolis, MN — booked at 2 independent cinemas.
- San Antonio, TX — booked at 2 independent cinemas.
- Portland, OR — booked at 2 independent cinemas.
- Rochester, NY — booked at 2 independent cinemas.
- Seattle, WA — booked at 2 independent cinemas.
- Washington, DC — booked at 2 independent cinemas.
- Santa Cruz, CA — booked at 1 independent cinema.
- Ventura, CA — booked at 1 independent cinema.
- Millbury, MA — booked at 1 independent cinema.
- Tampa, FL — booked at 1 independent cinema.
- Ambler, PA — booked at 1 independent cinema.
- Clearwater, FL — booked at 1 independent cinema.
If your city isn't on the list, the film may still surface on a future repertory week or festival weekend; check our full cinema directory, or browse the next seven days of showtimes for last-minute additions.
Why it belongs on the indie circuit
The independent and art-house exhibition circuit exists to surface films like this one — work that doesn't fit the wide-release calendar, doesn't have the marketing budget of a studio tentpole, and depends instead on programmers, critics, and word-of-mouth to find an audience. Past Sundance: Memoria is a clean fit for that model: a 2h 16m drama work, made outside the studio system, that benefits from being seen on a real screen with a real audience rather than queued up on a streaming dashboard. The cinemas listed in the schedule above are the venues currently doing that work for this title.
Cross-references
If you are building a viewing schedule around this film, our Drama genre hub indexes adjacent work in the same tradition. Programmer notes are sometimes the fastest way to triangulate which other films share a sensibility.