This rarely-screened film is a lush existentialist portrayal of personhood and contemplation of beauty as raw material. Written and starring Veruschka von Lehndorff – the fashion model cum performance artist incarnate – and directed by the photographer Franco Rubartelli, the screen is enveloped by the glittering miasma that is typical of the early 1970s. The model is a woman with a tortured soul. In the snowy landscape dreaming of sun and dust she is told: 'you’ll be like a tree taken away from the forest, your roots will be crying.' From its opening sequence we immediately see her iconography rooted into the earth as she appears camouflaged as a boulder in a pile of rocks. Between philosophical musings and panoramas of rural Italy, we watch her paint her face like a flower in a rainbow of hues and see her cavorting on a tree dappled in cheetah spots.

Throughout her extensive career, Veruschka’s image has been so iconic that she has always seemed to want to escape it. Her most celebrated images present her veiled in body paint, artful makeup and drag. Most were made in collaboration with Rubartelli who often captured her as a lynx or exotic cat leaning into her enduring animalistic magnificence. Speaking about a picture they had made together in the 1970s, Diana Vreeland said: ‘A world without leopards, well, who would want to live in it?’

Introduction by festival co-curator Dal Chodha.