The documentary elements of the film tell a familiar tale of dispossession and loss, oppression and exile, suffered by one (now elderly) Czech refugee, one of the displaced people who migrated to Asutralia in the aftermath of WW2. She tells her story in voice-over and sometimes direct to camera; and the public political events of her story (the death of Masaryk, the triumphal occupation of Prague by German and later Russian troops, incarceration in Terezin [aka Theresienstadt] concentration camp) are illustrated with archival footage. But such footage is sparse and enclosed in a frame of white or dark haze. The film is primarily composed of painted and animated sequences of falling leaves; step-printed fragments of re-enacted scenes from the narrator's past; fleeting but recurrent images of motifs in her story - a sewing machine, a motorbike, a typewriter, a fire in the Barrendov film studio, a child's snowboots; and snatches of Czech folk tales and folk music. The effect is of a jumble of confused and indistinct sights and sounds, the products of the failing memory of a woman's experiences of 50 years ago. It was long ago and far away, like the once-upon-a-time of fairy stories.

The film is strongly imbued with a poignant pathos. The stumbles and strangled breaks in Johanna's account of personal loss (of family, freedom, lovers and homeland) are wrenching but generally the film works to evoke a more lyrical pathos, a feeling that the movement of time is generally beneficent, in its capacity to heal hurt and muffle painful memories, and in its comforting gift of nostalgia for youthful fantasies, loves and hopes.

The nostalgia is already prefigured in the film's epigraph: "Two things are forgotten only in death - the face of our mothers and the face of our cities". The exile's lament conflates the body of mother with native soil, mourning the wrench from both homes of origin. But the film opens with magical images of autumn leaves that mutate into falling stars and snow drops. They carry suggestions of fairytale worlds, of the European seasonal changes, and of the fragility and brevity of life; intimations of romance, as well as pathos and sorrow. And sure enough, Johanna's romances are stressed as much as her traumas and sorrows. Her romance with the motorcycle, her romance with Czech nationalism, her romance with Richard, the second lover. Personal and political liberation are associated in her memories with her Harley motorcycle. And Richard, the only one of her lovers or husbands who is figured in the film, appears in association with the romantic world of film, in the re-enacted sequences set in the German occupied Czech film studios at Barrendov, amid the blinding lights and dancing figures of period costumed performers.

Since Johanna has spent most of her adult life in Australia, it is appropriate that most of the film was shot and processed here. The memories are here, not there, as Jo herself attests - she does not want to go back to Prague; her Prague isn't there any more; it exists only in her memory. So the fragments and traces of that past were in the main constructed in the here and now, with only a little footage shot in Prague. The weaving together of the heavily doctored fragments of film (which underwent a long and complicated process of tinting, re-photography and animation) may appear to disguise the heterogeneous sources and processes of production but it can also be said to represent the interprenetation of the present and the past, the here and there, the absent and the present.

This is a remarkable film, truly a labour of love. If not exactly a meditation on memory, it is an elaborate figuring of the process of retrospection through the medium of film. The film took seven years to make, and is the outcome of personal dedication and intensive experimentation on the part of director/animator Lynn-Maree Milburn, producer Julie Stone, cinematographer Andrew de Groot and their team of assistants. It has already received critical recognition, winning the Erwin Rado Award for Best Australian Short Film at the Melbourne Film Festival in 1993, and is now belatedly enjoying a theatrical release. The art house cinema has finally recognised that the most interesting and intelligent work in Australian cinema is currently locatable in those short features (or long shorts) that experiment with a mixture of fiction and non-fiction. Not requiring the exorbitant budgets of the big feature, nor suffering the concomitant pressures towards commercial viability, they allow for a more personal and exploratory approach to form and content. Like Laurie Johnston's "Eternity", Lynn-Maree Milburn's "Memories and dreams", is the product of intense personal commitment to a project, love for the chosen subject and love of cinema.