Hubert Geiger

“The Nineties had a pretty bad start”, this is how Vincent Dieutre introduces us to the shadows of his personal universe in those years going through Utrecht, Naples and Rome. In these three cities and two love affairs guide a homosexual man on his nightly search for lost beauty. In a cross between a diary and a baroque play the film reconstructs the fragments of a fateful journey against a Caravaggio backdrop. Painting, sensuality, losing oneself in a cityscape: the Leçons de ténèbres form an obscure fresco, a white-hot collage of trashy vanity.

“My best friend, Anna, asked me if I would mind taking her fifteen-year-old son Itvan to Berlin with me. I accepted immediately.” An elegant, refined man in his forties sets off with Itvan on a long, enjoyable journey, his Winter Journey. They cross snowbound Germany by car. As the man drives the boy through cities and countryside, Itvan discovers the past and the vast job of reunification now underway. Poetry and culture are also part of the journey, which is accompanied by classical German music. When their paths cross with the man's former lovers or the journey provides unexpected encounters, Itvan also gets to know more about the man's own life. When they finally arrive in Berlin, their ways must part. Itvan watches the man leave, taking the melancholy of his existence with him. However their journey together has created an unbreakable tie between the two men. Itvan will never be the same again.