A fascinating journey through the past and present, life and afterlife, profound, sorrow and unconditional love. 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. What characterizes women? What lies at the bottom of choices that involve their bodies and their intimate relationship with the life force? The protagonist’s critical situation and her determined choice to take courageously control of her life give way to a journey of exploring one’s soul, venturing into a fantastical terrain. Page after page, an 18th century doctor’s story helps Eva see herself in a new light. Finally, she can shrug off the thoughts of other - her doctors, her parents, and her lovers who all want to make decisions about her life. As if she were the first woman on earth, Eva finally sees her body and understands that only she can make a decision about her own destiny. Only she can listen to the voices from the past to call the present into question. Nowadays there is nothing exceptional about seeing inside our bodies. Needles, scalpels, and sonograms trespass the barrier of our skin, and we take for granted that we can see inside our bodies, but was it always this way? In ancient medicine, there was no way to look inside bodies which were seen as sacred and impenetrable. Surgery was considered a dangerous experiment; the only thing left to do was narrate a story about what was happening inside the body. Eva discovers the work of Doctor Johan Anmuth, who at the beginning of the 1700’s told the stories of his patients’ bodies through their fantasies and dreams. Soon after, the practice of surgery with its first dangerous attempts and rare successes would spread, and people would begin to understand what goes on inside our bodies. The successful TV series The Knick narrated the practical nature of early surgery, showing the horrific side and deep moral conflicts it created. In taking back her body and thereby deciding what to do with her life, Eva must take a leap backward to a time when surgery was considered the practice of sorcerers. Page after page, she looks into The Book of Vision and gets to know Johan Anmuth’s habits, which are so distant from what she has learned in her medical texts. This direct contact allows her to understand how important patients’ stories are and how talking about one’s illness and one’s body has the same weight as medical examinations. Opening oneself up to the world, in the end, also signifies healing. The protagonist’s awareness of her body opens herself up; Sexuality, illness, and, in the end, death are all part of the human experience. The body welcomes all these dimensions, manifesting them on our skin. Every time the doctor/patient relationship becomes conflictual, the medical therapy is bound to fail. Healing means creating a relationship. Eva knows this, both as doctor and patient. Nothing is more difficult for a doctor than to have the tables turned and become a patient, and yet every time it happens something surprising arises. It makes sense, then, that contemporary medicine is opening up more and more to narrative medicine where patients tell the story of their illnesses, and just by doing so, they undergo a healing process. This does not mean turning one’s back on scientific progress, however, this particular healing process takes place in an arcane and unfathomable space: the human soul. The Book of Vision deals with the doctor/patient relationship and tries to build a bridge between body and soul. Only by keeping this in mind doctor/patient relationship becomes profound and revealing. The possibility of traveling through time has always fascinated me and it may be why I fell in love with cinema since it can 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. Imagine if Barry Lyndon suddenly decided to launch himself into space. In the comic book, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the extraordinary qualities of the gentlemen travel through time. Eva has the ability to see such qualities through time and considers not only Johan Anmuth extraordinary, but also his patients and their stories. Eva’s ability to see wonder allows these characters from the past appear in the present. I’ve always held a passion for fantasy films of the ‘80s and ‘90s that I grew up with, 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 fantastical dimension. From a visual point of view, both the contemporary part and the past always take into account this ‘door’. The cinematography transforms everyday objects, instilling them with a quality that lies somewhere between reality and the fantastic; David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringer is an extraordinary example of this ambiguity. The Book of Vision wants to explore the space between the sensations of awe I had while watching 1980s fantasy movies and the disturbing elements of Kubrick and Cronenberg’s films, trying to find a new and original synthesis. A mainstay of the film is the synthesis of past and present in order to create a time that coincides with desire. To underline this aspect, the main actors in the present also interpret their doppelgangers in the past. Eva is also Elizabeth von Ouerbach, the patient of Prussian doctor Johan Anmuth, who, in turn, is also Doctor Morgan, Eva’s physician. The different characters add up to make a single protagonist, showing how every personality is a multitude of voices. The Book of Vision wants to homage the inexorable force of life and the need for constant rebirth. Each interrupted experience, each fall, and each unresolved love story inhabits a specific space and time yet is in continuous evolution. Cinema is the highest expression of this potential, an alternative world with its own nature. Each spectator’s experience of the film is elusive and cannot be controlled. Recognizing this while making a film is like leaning over a cliff, terrifying yet dizzyingly exciting. Carlo S. Hintermann TECHNICAL SHEET Title: THE BOOK OF VISION Production: CITRULLO INTERNATIONAL Coproduction Belgium: ENTRE CHIEN ET LOUP Coproduction UK: LUMINOUS ARTS PRODUCTIONS Executive Producer: TERRENCE MALICK Director: CARLO S. HINTERMANN Script: CARLO S. HINTERMANN, MARCO SAURA Location: ITALY, BELGIUM Genre: ROMANCE / DRAMA / MISTERY / FANTASY Language: ENGLISH DIRECTOR AND WRITER CARLO S. HINTERMANN Carlo S. Hintermann is an Italian and Swiss filmmaker and producer. After having obtained the diploma in classical percussion and having studied History of Cinema in Italy, he studies Film Directing in the US. He directs a number of shorts and subsequently together with Luciano Barcaroli, Gerardo Panichi and Daniele Villa he directs the documentary Rosy-fingered Dawn: a film on Terrence Malick (Venice Film Festival, 2002) followed by Chatzer: Inside Jewish Venice (Turin Film Festival, 2004). He also directs the animated short H2O (Annecy Animated Film Festival, 2007). He produces and directs the Italian Unit of Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life (Palm d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, 2011) and then directs the documentary The Dark Side of the Sun (Rome International Film Festival, Extra - Jury Special Mention prize Enel Cuore, 2011) exploring the relationship between animation and live action. In 2013 he directs the spot for the Rare Disease Day in collaboration with Annie Lennox and Eurythmics, he also realizes the spot for the campaign of 2015 both with the animation studio Moonchausen. As a producer together with his associate Gerardo Panichi he co-produces several movies, documentaries and shorts among the others Tsili by Amos Gitai (Venice Film Festival, 2014), Rabin: The Last Day by Amos Gitai (Venice Film Festival, 2015), Mountain by Amir Naderi (Venice Film Festival - Glory to the Filmaker Award, 2016), Dal Ritorno by Giovanni Cioni and Rhinoceros by Kevin Jerome Everson. He is also a musician, composer and film critic, he edits together with Luciano Barcaroli and Daniele Villa ‘Addio terraferma: Ioseliani secondo Ioseliani’, Ubulibri 1999; ‘Una storia vera - The Straight Story’, Ubulibri 2000; ‘Il cinema nero di Takeshi Kitano: Sonatine - Hana-Bi – Brother’, Ubulibri 2001; ‘Scorsese secondo Scorsese’, Ubulibri 2003 and ‘Terrence Malick: Rehearsing the Unexpected’, Faber & Faber 2015. fffff EXECUTIVE PRODUCER TERRENCE MALICK Terrence Malick is one of the most renowned American film directors, screenwriters, and producers. He made his directorial debut with the drama Badlands in 1973. Malick released his second film, Days of Heaven, in 1978, after which he took a long hiatus from directing films. His third film, the World War II drama The Thin Red Line, was released in 1998. Malick has received consistent praise for his work and has been regarded as one of the greatest living filmmakers.