Innocence of Memories

A multi-layered melding of fiction and fact, about Nobel prize-winner Orhan Pamuk and his Istanbul Museum of Innocence.


In this multi-layered melding of fiction and fact, Nobel prize-winner Orhan Pamuk reworks and expands upon themes and characters from his own novel and museum.

Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence in Istanbul aimed to reimagine the curatorial space in narrative terms, detailing the history of a couple’s affair through both fiction and tangible artefacts. Director Grant Gee (Patience [After Sebald]) interlaces the story of this unique institution’s genesis with that of the romantic encounter that inspired it, a meditation on the city itself... and Pamuk’s relationship to all three. Documentary and archive footage, interviews with the writer, enactments of the fraught erotic adventure, examinations of the evocative objects in the museum, travelling shots along the dark streets and windy waters of the great Turkish city – all combine to create an elegant, imaginative and dreamily sensuous exploration of memory and (be)longing, infatuation and illusion, love and loss.