Our Lady of the Turks

In 1480 Otranto fell to an Ottoman siege; a great many people in the town were killed, those who refused to convert were executed, and centuries later the Catholic Church declared them saints. Carmelo Bene's film does not tell that as history. It turns over and over inside the head of one man from Salento: he takes the place of one of the victims, talks to Margherita, who appears to him in the guise of a saint, and tears himself apart. Bene's first feature, drawn from his own writing, is built out of voice, colour and repetition rather than narrative. It carries an obsession rather than a subject; this is a place where memory and legend, faith and delirium all run into one another. It won the Special Jury Prize at the 1968 Venice Film Festival and became one of the most argued-over works in Italian experimental cinema.