A group of young people in Italy share stories of sexual abuse and damaged pleasure. A highly visual film, the darkness of the content gives way to the beauty of the landscape/bodyscape images. The main character, Maria, listens to young men and women tell personal accounts of sexual abuse and damaged pleasure in adolescence. She prompts them in ways that suggest her own need to manipulate their vulnerability and re-discover her own lost love. Each individual's story is transformed and re-invented in the telling, raising the possibility that in reality there is only one story. Maria inserts her own experience into a story already told, embellishing it with her own voyeuristic confession. Images of Tuscany and the sensual light which bathes the young nude figures in the film tempers its darker aspects with tactile lyricism. Finally the scars of abuse give way to the more tender sensibility of the imagery itself. The tableaux follow a pattern: each begins with the individual’s story; then a ritual of symbolic action follows in which parallels to abuse are acted out; next, absolution and cleansing in water; finally, a monologue in which a reflective, confessional statement is made. The film's tableaux are intimately bound to the particular sensibility and style of the filmmaking. Landscape/bodyscape best describes the overiding sense of imagery. The rituals of bodies bathed in wine, rubbed in dirt, washed and baptized suggest ancient themes, but the immediacy of spoken content acts to push the film forward in time.

Forms: Experimental, Narrative Fiction
Genres: Alternative, Erotic, Avant-garde, Art
Niches: Gay/Lesbian, Women, Mature/Adult