By Danny Flannery

What is your defining movie?

It’s the best and most irritating type of question – the kind that only prompts more questions. Do you mean my favorite movie? My first favorite movie? The most impactful on my art? The most impactful on my sense of self? The most important movie ever?

Each of the dozens of interviews in Roberto Mamfrim’s debut documentary feature The Movie of Your Life begins with the subject lost in thought, rolling that question around in their head. The scenes are intimate, often shot in the interviewee’s studio, or classroom, or by their darkened living room window. When they finally begin to speak, it’s often first to clarify how they understand the one and only question. “The film that made me realize I wanted to make films …” or “The film that really affected me …” or “My mom rented Rear Window for herself, and Bambi for me.”

The interviews quickly stack on top of each other, and The Movie of Your Life begins to show its hand. As the artists recap their “defining” films, they inevitably sink into the memories surrounding them, whether that means a first trip to a theater, siblings falling dead asleep to a “dad movie” while they stayed up, the first realization that filmmaking could be a real pursuit, or just the first time crying to a movie.

Through their answers, the interviewees – mostly filmmakers themselves – confirm that they experience art the same way we all do, as an intangible memory constantly written over, refined, and sometimes lost. Director Mauricio Eça captures this feeling best, describing when he first watched Lawrence of Arabia in a theater.

“I often say it’s one of the films that affected me most, but I saw it only once,” he says, laughing and staring off for just a second. “Maybe I don’t want to erase that memory from my head, of something so grand on the screen.”

It would be daunting if the subjects were exclusively filmmakers. Of course they can answer as eloquently as they do, that’s their job. However, Mamfrim takes pains to include artists of all stripes, emphasizing again and again how movies are in constant conversation with what we make and who we are, regardless of how we express it. Inspired by Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, an artist projects a kaleidoscope of gears and ships on an old building in the dead of night. A designer hand paints a jacket with imagery from Lost Highway, echoing how the David Lynch film stays with you less as a narrative and more as a cloak of regret and trepidation. A printmaker waxes on the impermanence of memory and buildings in the work of Wim Wenders, likening it to the perpetual building up and fading out inherent in her own craft as she presses and cuts abstracted prints of angels.

The film is a quiet, loving tribute to a community of artists who constantly carry the weight of their predecessors – not as a millstone, but as a keepsake. If you are the type of person to ask what someones’ favorite movie is and genuinely listen to their answer, this documentary is a must-see. You might even look back on it one day.

Catch The Movie of Your Life Thursday, March 5, 3:15-5 p.m. in Flagship Theater #4. The film will also run Friday, March 6, 11 a.m.-12:45 p.m. at the Princess Royale venue.