Jacques Mayano is a war report. He has just lost a friend-colleague and experiences the return home with great anguish; a deafening noise torments him, and his days are accompanied by fears and obsessions that his wife tries to deal with along with him.

A phone call arriving from the Vatican extends an invitation to meet him in Rome for an assignment.

Initially unenthusiastic Jacques accepts and is invited by Monsignor Vasillis to conduct a field investigation along with a canonical commission of inquiry.

Two years earlier, a 16-year-old girl named Anne, an orphan and novice, reportedly witnessed an apparition of the Virgin Mary in southeastern France.

Since then thousands of pilgrims have flocked to the site.

The Church submits to them documents of recognized and certified apparitions and the number of 60 official healings that have occurred at Lourdes.

Often in doubt it is preferable to endorse rather than speak of deception as tourism and these places become a real business.

He is subjected to the Holy Office's procedural standards of discernment for apparitions, among which of relevance are the honesty and moral rectitude of the person and the sound devotion of the visionaries..

Exorcists, psychologists, theologians, and journalists are involved in the investigation; Anna is questioned and describes the apparition and the words of the Virgin Mary, while cameras are ready to film her from all over the world.

Anna's face is reproduced everywhere even in snowballs at 8 euros each while Jacques continues to research and interview possible witnesses from the day of the happening.

Father Borrodine who always accompanies the girl is an ambiguous figure while Father Meyer is mainly interested in making the ongoing phenomenon media-friendly.

The film is divided into 6 chapters, each of which leaves some evidence open to question and take new paths. A labyrinth of supposed manipulations, truths, doubts, mysteries, and characters intersect on the face of Anna who declares her virginity and martyrdom as her reward, wishing she deserved such suffering.

This self-portrait would presume the psychological typology of the martyr, and Anna begins to not want to be nurtured as the unfolding events take an unpredictable turn.

The relic of the bloodstained sheet also opens up another viable avenue, and as the girl disappears the imponderable approaches.

The film insinuates itself into the paradox of those who have always sought tangible evidence, into the violence of war sites and finds itself in a universe that revolves around spirituality and the danger of its manipulation.

In a horizon in which loneliness mingles with the need for recognition, mysticism with illusion, sacrifice with fragility; the supernatural comes into continuous conflict with the disturbing and noisy realism of the globalization of indifference that becomes the only possible cause of the need to get in touch with the unknowable.

The poetry of doubt, as Giannoli calls it, is the inspiring principle of the narrative; every truth is circumvented, every interpretation deflected, every solution dilated.

In this tearing, estranging and pressing path, the question of the relationship between religion and faith emerges; of the need to remain on the threshold of mystery.

Inquiry is the pretext that subjects us to the obligation of questioning the necessity of doubt, of the disturbing beauty of the ungraspability of meaning.

there are no facts but only interpretations

truth is an illusion whose illusory nature has been lost

One hundred and thirty-seven minutes in which spirit and matter agonistically replay their attention; but the game does not end there because it dialectically opens to another point of view ... which may stimulate, tire, embarrass, exaggerate but surely achieve the only possible end, that of not being able to seal, package, define and identify an apparition as truth and a supposedly apparent truth as the truth.

23-Jun-2023 by Beatrice