In Search of Memory

Biology and psychology collide thanks to Eric Kandel, a Nobel Prize winner and neuroscience rock star whose study of memory’s synaptic manifestation revolutionized theories of cognitive recollection. This reverential, sentimental and occasionally bittersweet film only erratically illuminates his ideas. Rather, Petra Seeger prefers to honor Kandel’s boyhood remembrances as a Jew in Nazi-era Vienna, in lieu of digging into the fluid ways in which emotion and time influence the way people view the past.