It’s Not My Memory of It: Three Recollected Documents

“It’s not my memory of it” is a documentary about secrecy, memory, and documents. A
former CIA source recounts his disappearance through shredded classified documents that
were painstakingly reassembled by radical fundamentalist students in Iran in 1979 following
the takeover of the U.S embassy. A CIA film—recorded in 1974 but unacknowledged until
1992—documents the burial at sea of six Soviet sailors, in a ceremony which collapses Cold
War antagonisms in a moment of death and honor. A single photograph pertaining to a
publicly acknowledged but top secret U.S. missile strike in Yemen in 2002 is the source of a
reflection on the role of images in the dynamic of knowing and not knowing.