Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno

During the early 1960s, a time when the whole world was looking to France for exciting and challenging films, one director, Henri-Georges Clouzot, embarked on an ambitious project to create a film that he believed would herald a new type of cinema. The film was called Inferno and with an unlimited budget the director set about experimenting with colour and light effects to create intriguing and stylish images that were to reflect the increasingly paranoid state of the central character of his film. However the film was never finished and the hundreds of reels of footage left to gather dust. This highly polished documentary puts some of this remarkable footage onto the big screen and explores the story of this doomed project. The film will appeal most to those with a special interest in filmmaking who’ll relish the opportunity to see the strange experimental images that Clouzot created brought to life. [Gail Tolley]