Fifteen years away from Hollywood and nine years away from the international screen, Barbet Schroeder returns to his roots, not in the sense of his directorial debut MORE or his follow-up THE VALLEY but with an outdoor chamber piece that recalls his production efforts for Eric Rohmer (SIX MORAL TALES). The year is 1990. As East and West Germany break down the wall and move towards reunification, Martha (Marthe Keller, TIME OF THE WOLF) has spent the past forty years hidden away in Ibiza by the seaside in a hilltop cottage living a solitary existence by candlelight and has no plans to return to Berlin. Into her life comes young neighbor Jo (Max Riemelt, SENSE8) who has come to Ibiza to be part of the burgeoning techno music scene as a DJ. Unaware that Martha is a fellow countrywoman, he converses with her in English and the two slowly form a friendship built around their love of music. From the outside - through the perspectives of Jo's fellow DJ (Joel Basman, HANNA) and muse (Marie Leuenberger, THE CIRCLE) as well as Martha's longtime vintner friend (Fermí Reixach DARKNESS), the relationship seems like a May-December romance, but Jo knows very little about Martha despite the relative intimacy of their friendship: why she does not drink German wine, ride in German cars, the story behind the cello she refuses to play. The gulf between them comes into relief with a visit from his mother (Corinna Kirchhoff) and grandfather (Bruno Ganz, WINGS OF DESIRE) who have come to convince Jo to return to a changing Germany. The AMNESIA of the title refers to multiple states of forgetting: from Martha's "resistance" to everything German in light of the horrors of a war that to Jo is "ancient history" taught in school but not openly discussed even within family, to his mother who chose to move on and rebuild a shattered country, and finally it refers to the club where Jo is set to play, where music and its enjoyment are redefined with new creativity and technology. The first hour is an engrossing and tense character study that is sadly let down by the final third in which it is all too obvious what will happen when grandfather start telling tales after dinner and characters stop being characters and instead mouth out Schroeder's philosophy of forgetting as if it has been divvied up between the players. The film also reunited Schroeder and his SINGLE WHITE FEMALE cinematographer Luciano Tovoli (SUSPIRIA), a fine craftsman in his own right but whose natural light photography cannot help but recall that of Nestor Almendros (THE STORY OF ADELE H.) simply because of Schroeder's association with Rohmer.