‘A Photographic Memory’ Review: A Filmmaker Traces Her Late Mother’s Vibrant Life in Ingenious Meta Doc

variety.com:

Carlos Aguilar When filmmaker Rachel Elizabeth Seed first hears the recorded voice of her late mother Sheila Turner Seed, who died when she was only 18 months old, a long-buried sense of connection is instantly reawakened.

Seed, also a photographer, has spent years trying to construct a portrait of Turner from the substantial archival materials she left behind following a career as an adventurous, globe-trotting journalist.

Each element — Turner’s journals, the interviews she conducted, the television programs she appeared in, the photographs she took and her family’s home movies dating back to her childhood — adds depth to Seed’s vividly introspective documentary “A Photographic Memory.” But beyond the wealth of resources at her disposal, it’s the consistently meta and thematically relevant formal ingenuity Seed shrewdly deploys that make her debut a sumptuous piece of nonfiction.

Since she can only begin to know herself once she knows who her mother was, Seed creates a vehicle for self-discovery through the dissection of her most significant personal loss.