Angela Summereder | 1981 | Austria | 79’ | 16mm | German spoken, English subtitles 

Returning to a provincial crime scene, Zechmeister reconstructs the case of its (near absent) central character Maria Zechmeister, imprisoned for seventeen years in 1949 for the murder by poison of her husband in an Upper Austrian penumbra. Using re-enactments by non-professional performers and a handful of actual witnesses, fragments and rumour, in lieu of proof. The fluctuating surreality and somnambulant tone of Summereder’s recently restored film eschews human drama and moral clarity, proceeding by attention rather than persuasion – less a fantasy about revenge than an elegant and sometimes gothic reckoning with the fragile, unfinished processes of living together.