Jean-Charles Fitoussi

A child is confronted with the (ever young) old age of the world, its hazards, its cinema and music, shot in seven days in Rome, Fiumicino, Ciampino and Cineccità. What will happen on July 12, 1995, in Rome ? What will become of July 12, 1995, in Rome ?

Determined to change his life, the Count of Servadac donated his castle and each of the bodies of the family members to the avant-garde medicine of William Stein (great-grandson of Victor Frankenstein), duly poisoned for this purpose. . Opportunity for Stein to carry out the first transplant of memory neurons on human corpses.

Excerpts from the novel Donna di Messina (1949 and 1964, 1967) by Elio Vittorini (1908-1966).

The film is a love story which tells the impossible tale of two youths who have never before met. The action unrolls in Paris between 1979 and 1980.

A man returns to visit his native Sicily after living in New York for a long time. He learns about the Sicilian way of life from stylized conversations with an orange picker, his fellow train passengers, his mother, and a knife-sharpener.

Mourning the death of his partner and collaborator Danièle Huillet, Straub finds tender mercy in music and nature. Out of the abyss, Kathleen Ferrier sings “The Farewell” from Gustav Mahler’s “The Song of the Earth”, (which the composer wrote in 1909 after the death of his daughter) and Heinrich Schütz’s Lament on the Death of His Wife. The landscape also provides solace: the mountain grove where Endymion pines for his beloved Artemis, “a wild thing, untouchable, mortal,” appears to embody the Japanese concept of ‘mono no aware’ — a wistful acceptance of the fleeting beauty of things.

Laurent comes to visit his father not far from Bethune. But his father, who lives a hermit's life deep in the woods, has only one thing on his mind : to do away with his six children in order to relieve them of the miseries of life. Welcomed at the Caboche farm where his brother Frederic works (Frederic advises him not to try to see their father), Laurent is delighted to see hardy 81 year old Alfred again. The gods are not far off, and, despite all, the pleasures of existence too.