In Search of Memory

Two years after Eric Kandel's autobiography, In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of the Mind, brought his theory about the biological basis of memory to the masses, filmmaker Petra Seeger explores the Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist's story to the screen in this documentary. A Viennese Jew by birth, Kandel was forced to emigrate to the United States at the age of nine. After studying literature and Austrian history in New York, he became a psychoanalyst and, eventually, a neuroscientist. Ever since Kandel's traumatic childhood in Nazi-occupied Vienna, he became obsessed with the search for memory. In this film, we follow Kandel on a personal journey into his own memory, and follow him as he conducts research from his institute at Columbia University in New York.