THE POSSESSED   1965 Directed by Luigi Bazzoni, Franco Rossellini 95 minutes In Italian with English subtitles

One of the nice things about cinema is to go back and watch the little gems that have been totally forgotten about. The films of Luigi Bazzoni (Footprints, Le orme) are always cryptic and otherworldly. The have unreliable narrators, and everything is off-kilter. In his movies, the logic of the story is kept intentionally loose rather than tight, since the aim is to conjure up a fever-dream reality. This film is inspired in a true story in 1933 when a woman from the village of Alleghe in the north of Italy committed suicide, and then another died of an accident. Then thirteen years later two men were shot and killed, and slowly, connections were made that resulted in a scandalous conspiracy.
This film taps into those events. Our main character is Bernard, a writer who has lost touch with his creativity and feels he needs to rest a bit. He returns to the small lake-side village of Alleghe, to see if he can re-start a love affair with a girl who worked at the hotel. After he checks into his room he is told she committed suicide. With nothing else to do he starts investigating her death, only to find himself going down the rabbit hole as everything only get more mysterious... where memory, intuition, imagination, reality, and fantasy are all part of the journey.

So this is a murder story, but one that is seen through such a poetic lens! The visual design is incredible, and it contains some of the most ravishing black-and-white cinematography that you are ever gonna see. It's an exhausting movie just on an aesthetic level - almost every image is absolutely breathtaking.

This will be a high-definition screening.