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I watched Memento and was fascinated by the setting and plot, and then I stumbled on a short film in which a lady judge is talking with a criminal man who has committed a crime.
Towards the end of the film, we discover that the man has short-term memory loss. We find out that the lady judge is the daughter of a victim that was killed by the criminal.

The man doesn't know that he has this condition, and by the time the judge confronts him with her identity, the man's memory has already been "re-set", and he has forgotten what has happened during the trial. He seems to be confused about where he is and why he is there. The judge is disappointed that she didn't get to see him confronted with his crime.

We somehow know that the trial has been repeated many times (maybe over a span of years, I am not sure).

I don't remember any other characters in the film. If there were other characters, their role was very minimal. The trial takes place in a small room, and we can see the judge and the criminal talking. No other persons are seen talking.

The film is set in a sci-fi setting. The language spoken is English. I can't recall which year the film is made, but I saw it around 2010-2015 (but the film could have been made before 2010).

I tried Google, and posted on Reddit, but no answer has been provided yet.

I even asked ChatGPT, but none of the answers provided was even close.

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  • Asking ChatGPT is very hit-and-miss for 'ID-this-x' questions. It can only really identify very obvious matches, and even then it often gets them wrong.
    – Valorum
    Commented Nov 18 at 14:49
  • So, pretty much everything in your description is wrong: (1) It's not a judge, but a psychiatrist. (2) The man is not a criminal. (3) There is no trial. (4) No trial has been repeated many times. (5) There are lots of other talking characters. (6) It's not a short film but a TV episode.
    – user182601
    Commented Nov 19 at 6:10

1 Answer 1

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This is A Clean Escape by John Kessel.

A psychiatrist is treating a weapons manufacturer with anterograde amnesia, whose memories reboot once every 12 hours, leading him to believe he has just left his family to go to work but has been sent to the company shrink for evaluation. In reality however, much, much more time has passed than the viewer is originally led to believe. As the patient's memories are slowly becoming untangled, showing hints at a corporate conspiracy, but the actual truth of the matter is much worse than that. The corporate power play did happen, but that was decades ago - in reality, the patient had used his business connections to launch a presidential campaign, leading to him being elected President of the United States.

It was episode 1 of the TV show Masters of Science Fiction

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    Indeed, that is exactly what I was looking for. Thanks a lot.
    – Ahmad
    Commented Nov 18 at 7:50

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