Handling the Undead

Vojtěch's beloved Frantina is leaving for Prague to work. Vojtěch promises his dying mother that he will become a priest. His brother Karel is to inherit the mill. However, during the feast, he attacks the weak Josífek and then flees the village. He hides in a quarry with an unknown vagrant. While blasting a stone in the quarry, the vagrant dies, and Karel exchanges his documents for his own. Vojtěch is still thinking about Frantina in the seminary.

Two married, heterosexual chimney sweeps face experiences that unsettle their views on sexuality and identity. One has a same-sex encounter without considering it either as an expression of homosexuality or infidelity. The other finds himself in dreams where he is seen as a woman.

A young French man and an older English woman spend one night together on a ship.

Mordant, self-aware, freighted with sensitivity toward Chile’s problem, wary of caricature, disposed toward consciousness of human fallibility, it is a deft blend of fiction and documentary set in the tumultuous days leading up to the election of Salvador Allende in 1970.

Feminism, Victoria Benedictsson, Leandro N. Alem, the Radical Party in Argentina, suicide, stunts, Edgar Allan Poe, the complicated relationship between low-budget films with a political aim and the film industry, Robert Louis Stevenson, fiction, facts, greed, gold treasures left by the Jesuits in Argentina, the 19th Century vs. the contemporary and the search for truth and wisdom are the background for this portrait of a clash between a Swedish artist and an Argentine film director.