An academia-noir and armchair mystery in the lineage of Borges and Eco; the life of hyper-literate philosopher Béatrice Courte is interpolated with the (allegedly) true story of the "chronovisor," a device built in Italy in the 1950s that can photograph the past. A documentary bricolage of books, cassettes, newspapers, magazines, and VHS tapes constitute the film's center of gravity - around it orbits the fictional story of Béatrice, whose usually respectable research interests verge on the occult as the enigmatic "chronovisor" begins to occupy her every waking thought...
Year of production 2026 Length 99' CountryUSA Shooting Format Super 16mm Aspect Ratio 1.33:1 Dialogue English, French, German, Italian
Directors Jack Auen and Kevin Walker Production Company Cosmic Salon Films Producer Jason Zuriff Executive Producers Anne-Victoire Auriault, Pamela Jones, Craig Russell Associate Producers Christopher Kohler, Peter Kohler Writers Jack Auen and Kevin Walker Director of Photography Leo Zhang EditorsJack Auen and Kevin Walker Production Design Alex Peña Sound Design Eric Zhang Music Gustav Holst Cast Anne-Laure Sellier, Nicholas Tebben, Nicole Dimbrowski Risser, Alex Kolodkin, José Pacheco de Almeida
Director's Statement The facets of CHRONOVISOR that first revealed themselves to us were primarily atmospheric and aesthetic: cozy, gothic libraries, interminable stacks of books, bloodshot eyes, spending all night reading, forgetting to sleep, questioning everything - including your own sense of reality - all set against the wintery backdrop of timeless Manhattan institutions. Early discussions helped outline the contours of our central character. Béatrice, whose fundamental devotion to the intellect is as pure as it is uncompromising. But it took two key discoveries for the film to really take shape. The first is the story of the chronovisor itself. After Kevin stumbled across a passing reference to the device in Ambrose Andreano's "Angels, Archons, and Aliens," we found ourselves spending the better part of a year digging towards the bottom of what would turn out to be an infinitely deep well of possibility. This painstaking research consumed us long before it ever began to consume Béatrice, and the tantalizing temptation of such a machine's existence became a touchstone for our writing. The second was the discovery of Anne Laure, our lead actor. We did not properly appreciate how difficult it would be to find someone capable of embodying Béatrice. Her tendency towards long, multi-lingual monologues and esoteric vocabulary would prove a challenge for any performer, and it became clear to us very early on that these qualities would be most naturally inhabited by an actual scholar, as opposed to a trained actor. We often wonder why Anne Laure would bother to respond to an email from first-time directors asking her to be the lead in their film, but we pinch ourselves with gratitude that she did. The film rests entirely on her shoulders, and she carried it farther than we could have ever hoped. The ultimate intention of the film is to instrumentalize Beatrice as a sort of reductio ad absurdum of a certain kind of human being - the human being ostensibly preoccupied by worldly affairs and the 'life of the mind', while in truth motivated by a grander spiritual longing that undergirds its every waking movement. The hypocrisy generated by this human duality -- the nature and grace that exist within us, the spirit and flesh at war within our minds - is the film's central irony.
