Circuito chiuso (Closed Circuit)

What begins as an innocuous screening of a spaghetti western in a sleepy Italian movie theatre abruptly descends into a nightmare: as the climatic duel erupts on screen, a fatal shot is fired in the audience. The killer must still be inside the auditorium. The police lock the doors, force everyone to remain in their seats, and begin reconstructing the events in the cinema step by step. What follows is a nerve-racking, utterly unpredictable whodunit in which both the audience members and the cinema staff suddenly find themselves in the investigators’ crosshairs. 

Circuito chiuso is at once a giallo thriller, a meta-crime story, and a sharp sociological as well as philosophical study of moviegoers and the power of moving images. The film draws an eerie, almost hypnotic line between screen and spectators—and then deliberately blurs it. After this film, you will enter any cinema with a different gaze.

Florian Höhensteiger is a film archivist at Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archives) by day and a film projectionist at Sinema Transtopia by night.