CHRONOVISOR

While writing a monograph on historical theories of memory, Béatrice (Anne-Laure Sellier), a respected academic, becomes beguiled by the allegedly true story of the Chronovisor—an occult device said to reproduce visuals from any point in history on a TV screen. Her obsession with the mysterious machine drags her from her Upper East Side apartment through the depths of New York City's hidden libraries, to the edge of a breakthrough. Told largely via textual ephemera—from actual newspaper articles, scholarly journals, and books—and based in part on The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton and The Memory Palace by David Bentley Hart, this incredibly assured debut is deeply heady and layered while maintaining a knowing sense of humor as the central mystery unfolds—a real treat for the hyperliterate cinephile.