The writer, director, editor and narrator of “ Memory ,” Vladlena Sandu , grew up in ’90s Chechnya. War was on her doorstep, and often not only there, but inside her childhood home, with its boots under the table and its breath on her neck. As a poetic, deeply cinematic recollection of that turbulent era, told in densely allusive imagery, in grave Tarkovsky compositions and saturated Parajanov colors, “Memory” is already powerful. But as an evocation of all we lose to conflict — not just our personal histories, but any hope for a peaceful shared future too — it is extraordinary, tracking in acutely intimate detail the process by which trauma tumbles through generations like a virus moving from host to host, intent only on perpetuating itself.

“I remember when the USSR collapsed in 199

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