Crime without punishment. Euphoria without a hangover. Revelation without sacrifice. Cinema has always tended to establish a manichean worldview, to provide easy and comforting but false, manipulative resolutions. It need not be so, as the The Devil's Death proves.
In The Devils (1971), Ken Russell revisits the case of Loudun, France, where accusations of witchcraft against the priest Urbain Grandier become a weapon in the power struggle between Church and State. Religious fanaticism and the political instrumentalisation of faith expose the mechanisms through which authority manufactures guilt and legitimises persecution. In a different register, Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant (1992) follows a corrupt police officer forced to confront his own actions, while Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call – New Orleans (2009) explores the moral degradation of an officer whose authority becomes entangled with addiction and abuse. Takashi Miike’s Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo (2026) joins these two films, completing the trilogy screened by LEFFEST in a single day, on 10 November, at Cinema Medeia Nimas.
The cycle also includes works that push the representation of violence to its limits, such as John Alan Schwartz’s Faces of Death (1978), a compilation of images of death, accidents and war, and Caniba (2017), by Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, which follows Issei Sagawa, responsible for the murder and cannibalisation of a student in Paris. Taken together, these films confront viewers with images and figures that resist being contained within stable moral categories, questioning both the limits of representation and the position of the person looking.
Rather than abolishing the distinction between good and evil, The Devil's Death invites us to examine the systems that define it and the realities concealed by their classifications. By subverting cinematic and moral conventions, the cycle seeks to restore cinema’s capacity to unsettle certainties and make us look at the world differently.