Unseen Pictures (Alexandre Trannoy - L'Œuvre invisible)

Who is Alexandre Trannoy? Perhaps the most intriguing filmmaker you’ve never heard of—until now. In the 1960s and ’70s, the Frenchman worked on countless films with icons like Lino Ventura, Marcello Mastroianni, and Marlene Dietrich, yet not a single one ever saw the light of day. His shot at a Palme d’Or literally went up in smoke after a car crash on the way to Cannes. Though perhaps there was more to the story... The documentary Unseen Pictures, twelve years in the making, hunts down the traces—and the ghost—of the so-called “Don Quixote of cinema,” across decades of calamity, financial setbacks, and (self-)sabotage. The late Jean Rochefort, Anouk Aimée, and Jean-Claude Carrière contribute fragments to the strange portrait of a cursed and forgotten filmmaker. Dreaming of a liberated cinema, Trannoy seemed to live inside the films he imagined, walking the thin line between brilliance and deception. But how real was he, really?