ROSEANNA WILLS
is a 24 year old art history grad student in Montreal. She's a collector, passionate about photography and film. When she hears the story of the COUNTESS VIRGINIA DE CASTIGLIONE she throws herself into imagining and researching her life. It gives her something to think about besides her grandmother's cancer.

VIRGINIA OLDOINI DE CASTIGLIONE
is a young Italian aristocrat who becomes famous as the most beautiful woman in Europe when only 16. She is spoiled but surprisingly funny and intelligent. She speaks several languages fluently. She is a passionate nationalist recruited by the top Italian politician, Cavour, to convince the Emperor- by any means necessary- to support their cause. Public opinion turns against her and her contribution to her country cannot be acknowledged, and so she turns her passion and frustration into an obsession with photography.

METTE WILLS
is a 74 year old woman battling cancer, loneliness and dark memories. Mette was in the Danish underground fighting the Nazis when only 14. She raised her children and some of her grandchildren, including Roseanna for a while, in Canada. She is sometimes sharply witty and sometimes bitter and manipulative. Her ramblings are full of startling stories and her boxes are full of photographs.

SCENE 1. In the metro in Montreal. 2005.

The ghost of the Countess appears to a medium on the underground train- she comes closer and closer to him and as she does the years fall away until it is the ghost of a young girl staring him in the face. And then she disappears.

He arrives at home and Roseanna is there with a photograph of the Countess and a tape recorder. Roseanna gives a nervous and long-winded explanation of the class project that brought her there and the medium says, "Yes. She'd like to speak with you. Come in."

SCENE 2. A classroom in Montreal. Earlier in 2005.

Roseanna sits in a history of photography class, on the screen click through images of courtesans,pornography from the 1800's, some contemporary advertizing- the teacher asks what these images have in common.

The class answers:

"they're of women."

"they're about sex."

"they're selling something."

"those women are like objects."

The teacher says: "I want you to begin to think about the subjects of photography, and what you want from it, and what it wants from you.

This is a picture of a countess Castiglione from the same period as those pornographic images. In all she had over 400 pictures taken of herself by the court photographer to the Emperor Napoleon III. This is one where she dressed up her son as herself when she was a girl- She became destructively obsessed with looking at her own beauty. So consider yourselves warned about photography!"

Roseanna jumps in, saying: "Sir, I don't think those pictures of the Countess are the same. The women in the pornography and the ads look kind of blank, maybe they're just thinking about getting paid, but in these pictures the Countess looks sadder, creepier, sexier, whatever, just more alive. They feel different. Even the one of her son...well that's a little disturbing...I guess... I just think summarizing a person's whole life from the small surfaces we see might be a mistake."

Professor says: "Well alright. Last words: I encourage you all to prepare papers to present at the end of term conference, and Roseanna I challenge you in particular to tackle the Countess, since she seems to have you all fired up."

As the class packs up and Rose walks to the front, a bit bewildered, she says OK, and tells the professor she will have to miss next week. He tells her her questions are good, and that he hopes everything is ok.

SCENE 3. In London, at a ball given by Queen Victoria's mother. 1853.

Francesco Castiglione tells Count Walewski, Napoleon I's son, that he has come to find a wife. Walekski tells him that in that case he should have stayed in Italy. That the most beautiful woman in Europe is in Spezia.

SCENE 4. In Spezia. 1853.

The fisherman compete, blushing, for the right to carry 15 year old Virginia out to her boat. Her mother embraces her and crows "I have given birth to a masterpiece!" Virginia rolls her eyes.

Virginia rows out to her tower where the old folks tell her stories of its defense against pirates, and they speak passionately about the unification of Italy.

She returns home where she meets Francesco, and he is immediately enamored with the mouth, the waist, and "magnificent arms" of the most beautiful woman in Europe.

SCENE 5. On a train. 2005.

Roseanna travels to the home in Ontario. She studies a book full of pictures of Virginia de Castiglione on the train and takes pictures with a digital camera.

SCENE 6. In METTE's apartment. 2005.

Roseanna is dropped off outside by her uncle and father who are going for lunch and will pick her up in an hour. She goes up the elevator and finds Mette in the hall in her nightgown, bleary eyed. Roseanna takes her inside, opens a window to let out the stale smell of smoke and wine, and tries to find her something to eat but the bread and cheese are moldy. She brings crackers out instead.

Her Grama tells her sometimes she has to get out because the whole house tastes of radiation. And there's nothing for her to do anymore, she used to be able to read but now her eyes have gone bad. The hours get so long and there's nothing but the idiot box, and she misses watching it with Ben.

She drinks wine and chain smokes. She had a radical mastectomy. "Do you know what that is? Eh? They cut my breasts off. Not so sexy now! Even my shit is toxic." She's lost something of what made her a woman, she says. It's a good thing Ben's not here to see this.

"How did you meet him, Grama?"

"Ben? He stepped out of the dark and said "Halt who goes there!"

"No way"

"Yes M'am, he was stationned in Copenhagen as the war was ending, and I was walking home from my girlfriend's house. I had to share a pair of glasses with my mum and sister so I didn't have them that night, and I was skinny from the prison, and my friend had just told me that all I needed to do to meet men was smile. So I was walking down the street skinny as a stick, squinting, smiling, and blind, and out jumps your grandfather! He was in Copenhagen for just one week after that, and then we wrote each other letters. I was writing letters to about 6 different men, but he was the only one that stayed interesting, you know."

"You were seeing 6 different men!"

"Oh yes, well everyone was. We loved the British soldiers, you know, they were heroes. We grew up watching for their planes, and filling our backpacks with the gun parts and things they dropped in the fields behind the school. It was good to go with the ally boys- everyone loved you for it.

And if a girl went with a German soldier instead some men from the underground would come get her during the night, and strip her, and tar her, and tie her to a rail. And they deserved it, the sluts, there was a war on! Weren't there enough nice Danish boys?"

SCENE 7. In a law office in Florence. 1853.

Virginia's grandfather is devastated by the draconian marriage contract she's signed with Castiglione. He'd thought he'd made her understand: Justice is made by men and so it is injustice for women. She knows she's made a mistake, sacrificed any financial freedom she might have had, but she's going to go through with her engagement nonetheless. Her grandfather weeps.

SCENE 8. The Castiglione castle in Piedmont. 1854.

Virginia and Francesco have married and moved to his castle in Piedmont. She encounters more nationalism here because it is the only free province in what will be Italy. When her cousin Cavour comes to visit, the king's promise to reunite the nation is discussed with quiet fire. Cavour argues that only the support of a powerful sovereign will make this possible, and that Napoleon must be brought back to this cause by any means necessary. He asks Virginia to walk with him for a private word.

SCENE 9. Mette's apartement. 2005.

Grama tells of going to Denmark to reclaim, and nurse back to health, the child her daughter had put up for adoption. She traveled alone and was raped on the train by a Hungarian man. She used to hate Hungarians for that, but she is seeing a therapist now who is Hungarian, and she's funny and tough, a smart woman, she says. Anyway, back then she just thought she had to keep going to get her little grand-daughter, she wasn't going to go back to Grampa without his first grandchild! He wanted all his grandchildren close to him.

Roseanna's father arrives to pick her up. Mette takes hold of the framed photograph of the family gathered for her husband's funeral, holds it to Roseanna's face and asks "Everyone is together, who is missing, eh? Who isn't there?" Roseanna is hurt but she laughs. They leave, her father fuming.

Mette sits alone holding the photograph. We see her, 30 years in the past, holding a bright bit of glass in the orphanage to entertain the silent, understimulated baby. She sits for days. The red glass catches the light and casts colours across the grey room.

Voice Over: "I was the one missing from the photograph, but I'm not mad anymore about not being there. People can have a hard time coordinating things after a divorce, or a death, or any kind of trauma really. And you can spend your whole life afraid to move or take up space, or being angry, or waiting for an invitation."

SCENE 10. Uncle's house. 2005.

At dinner, Roseanna's aunt and father tell her that when grama returned to Canada with the baby, Alice, she returned as well to an unhealthy mental state. She needed to be purposeful, to be a hero even, and without that she drank, dwelled in dark memories of the war, and sometimes cruelly reminded her daughter that she was the one who gave Alice up. She was heavily medicated for a while and she would come out of the drug haze with a bitter, vengeful sense of wasted time. And as kids they'd never really understood why.

"She wasn't always like this, mind you. Some days I would get home from work longing to spend time with my baby, and your Grama would have her all ready for me give her her bath, and a bedroom cozy for stories."

Roseanna takes some pictures of her family talking around the table, and then of the happy, green and sunlit photos on the mantelpiece.

The narrator tells us that "In those weeks before my Grama died everything I thought I knew about her shifted. I'd get some new version of a story, and it would send everything I'd imagined as a kid slanting sideways. For example, based on bits of things I'd imagined, heard and misunderstood I'd always thought she had been a sniper in the war. I saw her with a rifle up on rooftops above the German soldiers in her town. When I learned what she'd been through it cast everything in my life in a different light. Like- other people's little cruelties might be about them, not me.

I guess I dug deep into the Countess project with this wrecking and restabilizing principle in mind."