Part essay film, part detective story, ELEPHANTS MAY REMEMBER is a documentary feature using Agatha Christie’s penultimate Hercule Poirot mystery, Elephants Can Remember, to explore how we cope with the loss and fallibility of memory.
In the 2000s, researchers Ian Lancashire and Graeme Hirst at the University of Toronto undertook a longitudinal study of crime author Agatha Christie’s work. Cataloguing her published pieces and the ages at which she wrote each one, the study found a steady decrease in vocabulary, greater instances of repetition, and an increased use of indefinite nouns in her novels as she aged—all recognized symptoms of struggles with memory. The study’s results, published in 2009, suggested that Christie experienced Alzheimer’s later in life, and that it was showing up in her writing. The most notable instance was the penultimate Hercule Poirot mystery Elephants Can Remember (1972).
That Elephants Can Remember marks the most abrupt decline in Christie’s faculties is poetic, and not entirely coincidental. The book follows not just famed detective Hercule Poirot, but also an aging crime author, Mrs. Ariadne Oliver, who is grappling with memory loss. The case? A double-murder that took place almost 12 years prior, necessitating that they rely only on the jumbled, fallible, slippery memories of the victims’ friends and acquaintances to solve it. “…what we’ve really got to do is get at the people who are like elephants,” Mrs. Oliver repeats, “because elephants, so they say, don’t forget.”
ELEPHANTS MAY REMEMBER opens with the same conceit as the novel—an aging crime writer is brought an impossible case—and unfolds by bringing the inherent investigative nature of essay films into a full detective story about what memories even are, and why we’re so afraid of losing them. The film combines Poirot and Mrs. Oliver into one character, of a detective on a case they can’t quite grasp. Led by this intrepid memory detective, we trace a path from the original study of Christie’s work through the emotional and physical feelings of memory’s fallibility, the science of memory, and the efforts being made to come to terms with the ways memory seems to fail us. Throughout, we remix the original novel’s story, using its narrative beats of research and tracking down “elephants,” to blend it with a series of inquiries into memory with a cast of researchers, dementia doulas, regular people, and the academics who ran the initial study into Christie’s work.
Amber Love (she/her) is a filmmaker and documentary editor based in Chicago, IL whose films explore intimate bonds and how we build futures together. Her work has been supported by PBS, HBO, IF/Then, The Gotham, NeXt Doc, and Short of the Week as well as screened at festivals including Doc 10 and Camden International Film Festival. Her most recent short film, “Lifetimes,” was funded by Firelight Films' Homegrown: Future Visions initiative and is available through PBS Digital. She has been a 2023 HBO/Gotham Diversity Development Fellow and a 2020 Sundance Art of Editing Fellow. Her debut feature documentary, One Another, premiered at SXSW 2026.
