Intense short Remember This screens at the New Jersey Film Festival!

by Catherine Liu

originally published: 09/16/2026

Andrew Serban’s short film Remember This caught me in its visual logic before anything else, prompting me to explore its themes of certainty and ambiguity, which kept me engaged throughout. The black-and-white cinematography feels like a world that presents itself in certainties, in right and wrong, true and false, yet the more I watched, the less I could verify anything. The form and the content are in conversation the entire time, and I found that genuinely satisfying.

The premise drew me in immediately. A journalist wakes up on a deserted New York City street with no memory of who she is, her bruises the only evidence of something she cannot name. There is a quiet irony in that setup that I kept returning to. She is someone whose profession is to locate and verify facts, now unable to verify the most basic fact of her own existence.

What I found most interesting was how the film layers its uncertainty to challenge perceptions. The woman she encounters is unreliable in ways that feel deliberate. Her name changes. Her accusations pile up without internal logic, cycling through antisemitic language, anti-communist attacks, and anti-immigrant rhetoric in ways that feel assembled rather than felt. I could not tell whether she was a threat, a true believer, or simply someone whose anger had no coherent source. That instability is the point, emphasizing the film's layered complexity.

What complicates things further is an unexpected reversal that underscores the film's ambiguity. The attacker ends up on the ground, claiming a twisted ankle, and suddenly becomes the weaker one. And when the journalist follows her, there is a flash of something in her own memory that the film refuses to resolve cleanly. One reading is that she did use the weapon, that the violence was mutual, and her memory has been protecting her from that fact. Another reading is that she only imagined it, rehearsing a response to fear, and that the moment the attacker fell, she let go of the impulse entirely. The film holds both readings without choosing between them, deepening the viewer's engagement with its ambiguity and thematic complexity.

Nobody in this film is clean, including the person we have been following. That moment reframes everything quietly. The ending deepens this further. After retreating to her car, the attacker does not leave immediately. She calls the journalist. It is an odd gesture, which might be a warning, a taunt, a flicker of guilt, something the film does not name. But that call is what allows the journalist to find her phone, and, with it, she later successfully took a photograph of the car's license plate. The person who attacked her inadvertently gave her the means to identify her. Help arrives from the wrong place, through the wrong channel, for reasons nobody intended. That structure runs through the entire film.

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Looking back, the attacker is paradoxically the source of everything the journalist needs. The wrong name, the distorted accusations, the physical confrontation, and finally the phone call that leads to the license plate, and all of it comes from her, and none of it is offered cleanly or honestly. Yet all of it moves the story forward. Whether the attacker intended any of this as help is a question the film does not answer and probably does not want to. What makes this structure more interesting is that we never enter the attacker's perspective. We stay with the journalist throughout, a person reconstructing reality from a fractured starting point. The audience ends up in the same position where piecing together what happened from the point of view of someone whose memory cannot be trusted. We are not observers of her confusion. We are inside it. The script handles all of this with real intelligence. This is a film that trusts its audience to sit with discomfort and contradiction, and that trust is rare.

I have watched it more than once now, and each time it settles differently. What felt unclear on first viewing becomes more deliberate on the second. Details that seemed incidental start to carry weight. The film is built for re-encounter rather than for a single definitive reading, and that quality is rarer than it sounds. I left it not knowing what was true, and I think that was exactly the point.

Remember This screens at the New Jersey Film Festival on Friday, September 18, 2026 – Online for 24 Hours on this date! Get more info and buy tickets here.

The 45th Bi-annual New Jersey Film Festival will be taking place between September 4-October 4, 2026. The Festival will be a hybrid as we will be presenting it online as well as doing select in-person screenings at Rutgers University. All the films will be available virtually via Video on Demand for 24 hours on their show date. VOD start times are at 12 Midnight Eastern USA. Each General Admission Ticket or Festival Pass purchased is good for both the virtual and the in-person shows when both are offered. We will also be offering an Audio-Visual Concert featuring the bands Hanging Coats and Lawns! The in-person screenings and the AV Concert will be held in Voorhees Hall #105/Rutgers University, 71 Hamilton Street, New Brunswick, NJ beginning at 5PM or 7PM on their show date. General Admission Ticket=$15 Per Program; Festival All Access Pass=$100; In-Person Only Student Ticket=$10 Per Film Program.

For more info on the Film festival go here: https://newjerseyfilmfestivalfall2026.eventive.org/welcome