A dark, sultry, surrealist and comic murder mystery. Protagonist is the infallible and slightly mysterious detective Lonnrot who works in a city that most resembles Mexico City in the near future. He has a strange and effective approach: he hates the obvious and prefers to seek the answer to a crime, like an alchemist, via the most complex and intellectually demanding road. Lonnrot’s sworn enemy is Red Scharlach, who has shot a friend of his during a robbery. But Scharlach also has reasons to hate Lonnrott: several years previously there was a bar fight in which his brother died. The men have been trying to get each other for years. In the end the mysterious murder of Doctor Marcel Yarmolinsky during the Third Talmudic Congress brings them together.For this film version made for the BBC of a story by Jorge LuisBorges, Alex Cox chose his beloved studio in Mexico City as work place. As a result, he says, he was able to make a film with an enormous production value for a modest sum. As part of Cinema made by Television the festival already screened in 1993 the TV version of Death and the Compass. For the real aficionados of the bizarre film style that is all Alex Cox’s own, now the feature version.
