In 'The Souvenir Part II," a human-scaled epic concludes

Joanna Hogg first had the instinct to make a film about her then unfolding relationship to her heroin-addicted first love in 1979

NEW YORK -- Joanna Hogg first had the instinct to make a film about her then-unfolding relationship to her heroin-addicted first love — a traumatic and formative time that coincided with her coming-of-age as a filmmaker — in 1979.

Back then, she didn’t feel capable of tackling something so ambitious and personal. Her career detoured, instead, into television. It wasn’t until Hogg was 47 that she determinedly returned to movies. After making three well-received features, Hogg felt she was finally ready.

The result — “The Souvenir,” which Hogg made in two parts, filmed two years apart — is a stunner. A sublime work of memory and autobiography, “The Souvenir” ( the second part of which a24 opens in theaters Friday ) captures a masterful filmmaker using all her accrued skill to revisit her early, half-formed life as a young filmmaker in the midst of finding herself.

“I was surprised with the making of both these films how I remembered more than I thought I did,” Hogg said in a recent interview from London. (Her Zoom window read “fellini.”) “Sometimes, it’s just about focusing on that particular point in time and then things come up. I wouldn’t have said that before the process because I didn’t believe that was possible. I thought you remember what you remember, that there’s no way to retrieve a memory.”