In 1999, poet Alan Brunton goes to Christchurch to act in Samuel Beckett’s memory-play,”Krapp’s Last Tape”. He is followed by the filmmaker Shahin Yazdani who captures a world of ambiguity that descends on the production. Yazdani is present from the first sessions, as the director of the play undertakes a probe of Brunton’s mind, demanding his most authentic memories. Yazdani has constructed his film, “Krapp’s First Video”, as multiple, even contradictory texts, consisting of the juxtaposition of image, word, text and sound effects with memory as their pivot. The film’s effective juxtaposition of the parts, in turn, results in a bringing together of the whole as a “stream of consciousness” which no longer differentiates between objectivity and subjectivity, reality and dreams, fact and desire, the past and the pluperfect. At times this collage of video images (of the rehearsal and the performance, as well as those inspired by Beckett’s text), sound and text complement one another, and at other times they clash with one another and create a sense of unease and tension. Yazdani returns again and again to the image of a suitcase at a railway station, the container of memory left behind as the train leaves for an unknown destination. Analogous to the suitcase is the film itself, pregnant with unlimited possibilities for containing meanings. Like Beckett, Yazdani situates himself where farce meets tragedy, and thereby manages to represent a film that is insistent, strategic and candid. It is both an inventive fiction and a haunting documentary.