1968 | France | Fiction

Une histoire immortelle (The Immortal Story)

  • French, English English 58 mins
  • Director | Orson Welles
  • Writer | Orson Welles
  • Producer | Micheline Rozan

STATUS: Released

This film is currently not available.   

Orson Welles’s first color film and final completed fictional feature, The Immortal Story is a moving and wistful adaptation of a tale by Isak Dinesen. Welles stars as a wealthy merchant in nineteenth-century Macao, who becomes obsessed with bringing to life an oft-related anecdote about a rich man who gives a poor sailor a small sum of money to impregnate his wife. Also starring an ethereal Jeanne Moreau, this jewel-like film, dreamily shot by Willy Kurant and suffused with the music of Erik Satie, is a brooding, evocative distillation of Welles’s artistic interests—a story about the nature of storytelling and the fine line between illusion and reality.

Myth Obsession Power Illusion Mortality
Film Organizations
The Criterion Collection
DISTRIBUTION