Agnès Nobecourt

Puglia, southern Italy, around 1400. A convent is invaded by the Tarantula cult, whose fanatical and crazed members desecrate the sacred place by committing obscene and bloody acts.

The vows of an ambitious young American priest are tested during World War II. Not only does Father John Flaherty get involved with the black market to raise money for the Vatican, he also falls in love with a young French nun.

During the French Revolution, a surprising company shares a coach, trying to catch up something - the time itself, perhaps.

Young radical Riccardo returns home after hiding in South America for five years, only to find out that his comrades either gave up their ideals or turned to drugs, while all they fought for seems to have set the stage for near-anarchy.

A newly-elected Pope Leo XIV finds himself accidentally locked out of the Vatican. Unknown to the outside world, he winds up in an impoverished Italian village, where his adventures ultimately teach the Pope and his new friends some important lessons about friendship and self-esteem. Written by Chris DeSantis

In Italy, set in the early 1930s, a missing Swedish millionaire (Erland Josephson) is the target of a journalist (Rüdiger Vogler) who sets out to discover exactly what happened to the man and whether or not he is still alive. The biggest lead he has is the millionaire's attractive mistress (Brigitte Fossey), and the story takes off from there.

An experimental video variation on Shakespeare's Hamlet.

A microcosm of people lost in search of an artificial happiness, which leads them to steal and prostitute themselves for the short ecstasy of a squirt of heroin in the veins. Marco and Pina live in this world of drugs, prostitution and violence, and they must fight for their survival. One day one of their friend dies during a holdup. Marco and Pina are helpless and will do anything to escape, but fate does not want a similar world. Between bites of heroin and sidewalk they are in a deadly trance.

Oskar Panizza’s The Council of Love (1895) is a blasphemous play set in 1495, during the first recorded outbreak of syphilis, which Panizza satirically presents as the punishment from Satan for sexually active humans. As a result, Panizza was imprisoned for obscenity. Schroeter alternates scenes from the Panizza’s work with a dramatization of his trial, presenting the play as an expressionist spectacle performed by actors wearing exaggerated makeup who gesture and grimace grotesquely. The film thus forms a bridge between Schroeter’s use of tableaux in his early experiments with the political urgency of his 1980s films. On the eve of the AIDS crisis, Schroeter is presciently worried about disease as an excuse for governmental repression and the oppression of sexuality. - Harvard Film Archive