Director's Works
Las profundidades de la memoria Chloe de Brito
Chloe de Brito (she/her) is an Australian Directors Guild award-winning director and artist whose work merges the real and imagined into dreamlike yet visceral worlds, attuned to myth, memory and the unseen. Her short Pink Reef (2022) premiered at the Oscar-qualifying Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) before screening at Fantastic Fest, Flickers’ RIIFF, and Fantaspoa, and was later showcased by the Australian Centre for Moving Image at BFI Southbank. An alum of MIFF Accelerator Lab, Sydney Film Festival Platform and Adelaide Film Festival EXPAND, she has created moving-image works for Sydney Opera House, Bangarra Dance Theatre and Vivid Sydney (Space to Dream, 2025). Her recent short hybrid documentary Las profundidades de la memoria (2025) shot under the mentorship of Apichatpong Weerasethakul had its world premiere at MIFF in August.
This film began as a quiet conversation with Martina, a Mayan woman I met on the streets of Tekal de Venegas, México. She approached me for friendly conversation in a truly serendipitous collision, and over time revealed that as a child she had witnessed violent conflicts within her family. Memories she had carried for decades, unspoken even to her granddaughter.
One evening, as a storm rolled in, her voice shifted. The air felt thick, electric, ancestral. In that moment, she entrusted me with her story, and I realised the film would not recount events straightforwardly, but conjure the atmosphere of memory itself and the sharing of her memory to me - haunted, fragmented and alive with ghosts.
I sought to create a world where time folds, where ghosts live not only in people but in the landscape, the thunder, and silence. Resisting linearity, this film is instead a woven tapestry of fragments, interruptions, and hauntings, much like memory. I was inspired by filmmakers Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Maya Deren, and Marta Pajek who show how the surreal can illuminate rather than obscure truth in ways that transcend the physical.
With Martina’s words as its spine, and stylised visuals and soundscapes as its body, the film becomes a hybrid of documentary and dream that lingers as a reflection on how trauma endures. Not only in bloodlines, but in the unseen landscapes of the mind - surfacing in thought, dream, and silence.
Las profundidades de la memoria (In the Depths of Her Memory) was shot in Mexico under the mentorship of Apichatpong Weerasethakul as part of the Creators Lab run by Playlab Films.
