He is old. And Hitchcock questions why he hasn’t become a priest if he is such an advocate of social purism and Moral art? But the man curses: Hitch, despite his innate Catholicism, should have become a magician. What’s more, old Roberto doesn’t think that cinema is Entertainment. Sometimes he looks like a big belly. He also had a son, Federico, who he thinks strayed into another bloodline. Chaplin comes in too, and finds a middle ground between Morality and Entertainment, Art and Industry.

This is a theatre of silhouettes, a distillation of stylised silent film controlled by Winnipeg-born Guy Maddin and brought to life by actress Isabella Rossellini. It is a tribute to the centenary of her father, neorealist director Roberto Rossellini. Maddin and Isabella Rossellini have collaborated several times and in various formats over the last 20 years, both as co-directors and as director and actress. Their perhaps best-known film is The Saddest Music in the World (2003), in which Rossellini plays a wealthy woman with beer-filled glasses. At the same time, the film is a digression in cinema history, a feat of supernaturally lively imagination that confronts Rossellini’s many facets and faces: his daughter Isabella fearlessly embodies both her father as well as Cinema itself and a lost era. During one of her father’s long absences, the daughter says, “As a little child, I thought he was God. Then, as I got older, I had to come down a little bit and say he was a genius.”