Enchantment

A tarot card reader; a woman surviving one of the most horrific cases of sexual violence and homicide in Italy in the 1970s; a woman accused of the homicide of four people; a woman who’s obsessed with the idea of death while another seeks an answer to violence through religious practice. These voices bring out, in different ways, the relationship to life through the discourse of death.

DIRECTOR’S NOTE

The color film images show natural, familiar landscapes, from the sea to the hills, semi-abandoned suburban places, the interiors of a house. They give shape, in a single flow, to a sort of diary of notes and seem to suggest a wandering outside of time, into emptiness and loss, a memory of something that has been and is no longer. The images, like a long interference, stand in stark contrast to the sound track which attempts, for its part, to recompose fragments of stories, sometimes raw and sometimes intimate, as if the mere act of listening could be an intrusion. The film comes to life from the tension between the images and the voices, between an almost familiar connection to space, strengthened by the use of 16mm and super8 film, and the dark scenarios that the voices want to embody. The fragments of voices construct a single monologue that becomes a mirror of my own anguish: the emptiness, the fear of death, the error, the doubt that weighs on those who argue about innocence and guilt. “What is justice really?”, the fortune teller asks and asks me at the end of her reading. This question remains unanswered floating in the suspension of the present.