The Book of Vision, directed by Carlo S. Hintermann and Terrence Malick as Executive Producer, will officially open the 35th Venice International Film Critic’s Week, an independent section organized by the Sindacato Nazionale Critici Cinematografici Italiani (SNCCI) – Italian National Union of Film Critics – within the 77th Venice International Film Festival in September. Charles Dance, star of the TV series Game of Thrones, Lotte Verbeek, Sverrir Gudnason, Isolda Dychauk and Italian actor Filippo Nigro star in Citrullo International’s first feature film.
The film, co-produced with Entre Chien et Loup (Belgium) and Luminous Arts Productions (UK), with Rai Cinema including the support of Direzione Nazionale Cinema (Italy’s National Film Bureau) and the Province of Trento, is a fascinating journey through the past and present, life and afterlife, profound sorrow and unconditional love. The Book of Vision offers audiences unique imagery created by a first-rate technical cast.
Eva, a promising young doctor, leaves her brilliant career to study History of Medicine in a remote university. Now is the time for her to call everything into question: her nature, her body, her illness, and her sealed fate. Johan Anmuth is an 18th-century Prussian physician in perpetual conflict between the rise of rationalism and ancient forms of animism. The Book of Vision is a manuscript that sweeps these two existences up, blending them into a never-ending vortex. Far from a proper scientific text, the book contains the hopes, fears, and dreams of more than 1800 patients. Dr. Anmuth truly knew how to listen to his patients, whose spirits still wander through the pages, life and death, merging in a continuous flow. The story of Anmuth and his patients inspire Eva to live her life to the fullest. Nothing expires in its time. Only what you desire is real, not merely what happens.
Joerg Widmer is the Director of Photography. Widmer’s work includes collaborations with directors such as Wim Wenders, Quentin Tarantino, Michael Haneke, Roman Polanski and Bela Tarr. Production Design is by David Crank. His credits include Paul Thomas Anderson’s films There Will Be Blood, The Master and Inherent Vice. Crank worked with Steven Spielberg on Lincoln and is a long time Terrence Malick collaborator, having worked on The New World, The Tree of Life and To the Wonder. Mariano Tufano is the Costume Designer. He has worked on a large number of Italian and international productions including Il Piccolo Mondo Antico, The Importance of Being Earnest, The Passion of the Christ, Tristan and Isolda and Nuovomondo – Silver Lion-Revelation at Venice International Film Festival 2006, for which he won the David di Donatello for costume design in 2007.
“The possibility of traveling through time has always fascinated me and it may be why I fell in love with cinema. It allows us to leap into different dimensions of time and space. In The Book of Vision, the time travel is a source of strength, both visually and narratively. I grew up with fantasy films of the ‘80s and ‘90s, such as The Goonies, Labyrinth, The Neverending Story and Back to the Future. The mechanism in these films is almost always the same: a door is opened onto an unexpected fantastic dimension. From a visual point of view, both the contemporary part and the past always take into account this ‘door’: every place, every object, every action has an ambiguous value, poised between two dimensions” says Carlo S. Hintermann.
