Some-magical-times, cinema can unfold like a novel, an epic tale, with its roving roster of characters that inhabit our minds and visit us in dreams. It takes us several days, once the book or in this case the film has ended to properly bid them farewell and return to our own reality. But the intensity of the encounters we’ve made will never entirely fade away.

Watching Anna today is an uncomfortable experience for the most part. The gender dynamics depicted on screen leave much to be desired. To say nothing of the relationship between the filmmaker and his subject which is fraught with abuse, at times verging on cruelty, and is sure to leave any discerning viewer cringing. And yet, and yet.

Something radiates from this work. There is of course the unique context of the time: a post-68 Italy amidst the high tensions of the years of lead. There is the unconventional nature of the material: an experiment in cinema veering into video, blending cinéma vérité, theater, and revolution. There is the filmmaker Alberto Grifi, a central figure in experimental Italian cinema, and his sidekick actor Massimo Sarchielli.

But most notably, there are beings, comets on fire that make the streets of Rome shine with a feverish glow. In the wandering fauna that gathers in Piazza Navona, some figures emerge. First, there is Anna, the stellar Anna, chased by the camera, the nuns, the doctors, the men who all want to play the father figure, and all those prison guards who purport to know what she needs better than she does herself. There is the tender Vincenzo, who jumps off-screen to seize reality and alleviates the sordidness permeating the film. And then there are the wide-eyed young people who soliloquize. We would so much like to wish them a gentler existence, but violence is inescapable. And so Anna flees, once again. Where is she today?

Naomie Décarie-Daigneault
Tënk Artistic Director